What I Tell Every Gymnastics Coach When Their Season Ends

Every spring I get a wave of DMs, emails, and consulting calls from coaches who had a frustrating season. Injuries they didn’t see coming. Floor cardio that wasn’t there in February when they needed it. Skills that stalled out right before nationals. And what I hear from almost all of them is some version of: “We worked so hard. I don’t understand what went wrong.”

And I get it. It’s not that coaches aren’t trying. It’s that most programs don’t have an off-season system — they just kind of coast through it and hope the preseason fixes everything.

It doesn’t.

Here’s what I actually think is happening, and what I tell programs when we start working together.

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Before any of this planning happens — do a season debrief.

This is the step that most programs skip. Not a casual “how did we do” warm up conversation. A structured end-of-season review with specific questions: What worked? What didn’t? What do the injury patterns tell you? What would athletes say if you actually asked them?

Nick Ruddock, who I’ve had on the podcast multiple times, talks about this better than almost anyone. His framework separates reflection (what happened and why) from action planning (what we’ll change). When you blend those two phases together, you get defensive conversations instead of honest ones. Coaches start justifying instead of learning.

There’s a line I’ve heard him say that stuck with me: ten years of coaching without structured reflection isn’t ten years of experience. It’s one year repeated ten times.

Run the debrief. What went well in season, what didnt, what things need to be learned, and who do we need to contact for help if required. Write it down. Let it actually shape what you do this off-season differently. That’s the part that turns a frustrating season into a better one — not hoping something changes, but building a system so that change is intentional.

The off-season is not a break from your system. It’s where your system gets built.

I use something called the Hourglass Model to explain the physiology of a gymnastics year. Picture an hourglass. The top chamber is your athlete’s physical reserve — fitness, tissue capacity, strength base, resilience. The competition season drains it. Every late night meet, every compressed training week, every extra conditioning session chips away at what’s in that top chamber.

The goal is to arrive at championships with enough left in there to actually perform. Not be running on fumes.

Most programs show up to preseason with a half full hourglass because the off-season didn’t do what it was supposed to do. They may have kept athletes “busy” — some conditioning, some skills, and so — but they didn’t strategically rebuild the physical reserve that the season just spent. In research, this is referred to as a ‘chronic workload”.

What I try to get coaches to understand is this: the off-season is about raising the floor, add as much sand to the hourglass as we can. We want to improve overall strength, aerobic fitness, technical basic ability, and gain skills to be used in season. Raise the floor high enough, and the preseason ramp isn’t as challenging or dangerous to get in peak meet mode. Leave that chronic workload and floor low, and you’re asking athletes to sprint uphill with nothing in the tank during preseason— which is exactly when injuries happen.

The science on workload is pretty clear on this, and most coaches haven’t seen it.

A few years back I got to work with Tim Gabbett, who is probably the most well-known researcher in the world on workloads and injury risk. His work shows something that sounds obvious once you say it out loud but that almost no one actually applies: a 10 to 15% increase in weekly training load is manageable. This is called increasing acute workload. Athletes absorb it, adapt, get stronger.

A 50% or greater spike in workload? The injury risk doesn’t just go up. It goes up exponentially.

This is what happens when a program takes two weeks off in June and then immediately starts full preseason conditioning in July. Or when a coach realizes in October that the first meet is four weeks out and suddenly triples the number of routines athletes are doing per week. I’ve seen this pattern so many times — a girl comes into the clinic six weeks into preseason with a stress fracture in her low back, and when I ask what changed, the answer is almost always some version of: “We started doing a lot more routines and we added back walkovers into warm-up.”

Good intentions. Zero workload tracking.

One of the most basic things coaches need to do is plan. You need to plan out your 2, 4, 6, 8, and 12-week plan for the off-season. How many days per week are you training? How many reps of skills is realistic per event when learning new skills (not just “45 minutes of beam series”). How many sets of squats, leg lifts, rope climbs, pullups, etc., are you doing? These things need to be outlined, written down, tracked, and at the forefront of your off-season training.

Another of the simplest tools we use with programs is session RPE. After practice, athletes rate how hard it felt on a 1–10 scale, then multiply that number by the number of minutes. That gives you a training load score for the session. Track it week to week and you can see when you’re spiking things before the injuries show up. It’s free, it takes two minutes, and almost nobody does it consistently.

What the off-season actually needs to contain

When I look at a well-designed off-season, the work falls into four areas. Miss any of them and you’ve got a gap that preseason won’t close.

Strength to power development. You need a real strength base before you can develop power. Challenging cross-training and progressions, challenging bodyweight strength, and accessory work patterns. Most programs try to go straight to explosive work without building what goes underneath it — and that’s why athletes plateau and why things break down later in the season.

Energy systems. I hear coaches say “we do conditioning,” and what they mean is they run or do long, random circuits full of different gymnastics exercises. Running is, unfortunately, mostly junk mileage for gymnasts. It doesn’t train the right energy system, doesn’t transfer to gymnastics movement patterns, and adds impact to joints that are already taking a beating. What actually works are bikes, sleds, med ball circuits, aerobic intervals on gymnastics-specific movements. That’s how you build an aerobic base that carries through a season. IF you want more on this, my good buddy Diwesh and I did a huge podcast deep dive on this.

Gymnastics skill development. Off-season is when you have the mental space to actually teach. No meet anxiety, no coaches panicking about routines. This is the window to address technical issues, build great basics and shaping, and reinforce better habits. Once competitive pressure hits, change becomes much harder. Use this time to really dial back to the foundational skills, and also play around to get new ones.

Athlete wellness and prehab. Whatever was taped together at the end of the season needs real attention now. Not just so things don’t break — but so those tissues have actual capacity heading into the load of preseason.

**The 12-week preseason structure**

You should be making your off-season pre-season right in tandem with your pre-season. This allows strength to translate into power, aerobic cardio to build anaerobic routine endurance, and skills to translate into great routines. Once the off-season block is solid, preseason has a shape to it: roughly twelve weeks, split in two.

The first four weeks are a transition block. You’re bridging from general off-season training into gymnastics-specific work. Volume is controlled, and this is your last clean window to make technical changes before competitive pressure makes them almost impossible. I always tell coaches: if you want to change something, change it here, and bring your athletes and staff along with you. A change they don’t understand won’t stick when the pressure is on.

Weeks five through twelve are the gymnastics-specific block. Skill progressions are layered in, set endurance builds, mock meets happen. Conditioning shifts from aerobic base work toward anaerobic intervals that more closely match what competition requires.

Where to go from here

If you want something practical you can use right now and get a head start with the off-season, start with our new free 60 minute gymnastics coaching course “Essentials of Gymnastics Coaching.”