Observation from a gymnastic training center

[Shaf]

My daughter, who is 4 1/2, participates in movement skills/pre-gymastics classes at a local gymnastics facility. I'm there for at least an hour a week just hanging around.

I've really noticed a visual trend in the female gymnasts (the competitive ones) since they practice at the same time.

At a young age, say 8-11, they are all pretty much skinny with impressive musculature in their upper backs and shoulders.

There's a gray area between 11- and, say 14, where they can be either skinny, or starting to put on a noticable layer of fat. A few are downright chubby.

Most, if not all, of the high school girls have the muscle, but their definition is entirely obscured by fat. A few are surprisingly chubby for girls who've been competitive athletes for so long.

One of the coaches was lamenting this to the another, and the second coach mentioned that 10-15 years ago, the girls team spent roughly twice the hours training than they do now.

The first coach also commented that most of his teen girls were also on birth control.

I also seem to think that their copious consumption of soda and perhaps overall neglect of nutrition might be to blame as well.

Is this widespread trend, or just local?

[John Sapinoso]

most gymnasts are extremely lean by necessity

doesn't sound like any gym that i've been to.

[Shaf]

I'm not talking fat as in "obese", but in most cases there's an obscuration of definition that's noticable, especially compared to the younger girls. There are a lot of younger girls compared to teens, so maybe there just isn't a large enough group of girls at that age to compare.

This is not the case for the boys and young men (oldest male gymnast is maybe 15 there)

This observation really was counter to what I had expected.

[John Sapinoso]

hmm if that's the case here's my theory on the situation:

1)

The skill gap between recreational and pre-team is larger than the gap between pre-team and team

so the younger girls who are put unto the pre-team are selected more aggressively based on their physical attributes and potential, weeding out those who would be unlikely to advance any further than pre-team.

as they girls age, their genetic body types begin to reveal themselves, some are larger, others more lean.

but since they were already selected for pre-team and acquired the necessary skill through training they advanced to team despite body types.

2) purely statistical reasons....small population size could skew the proportions of this random sample

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there are so many things that could be the cause of this, but most of those things are likely to be correlation without causation.

[braindx]

Depends on how serious they are about gymnastics generally speaking. If you're serious, then you try to get more gym time and work harder. You will also try to regulate what you eat and especially try not to gain too much excess weight to prevent deteriorating your strength to bodyweight ratio.

Although it's true the invention of high fructose corn syrup and other such sugars makes it harder to keep off the weight. When I was doing gymnastics competitively (early-mid 90s), we were notorious for eating junk food even during our breaks between the 4.5 hour practices where we could just get a candy bar and a soda. So yeah.. poor nutrition is fairly widespread mostly because a lot of people don't know HOW to eat well.

[Calbear]

Shaf,

I have to agree with you. But i need to preface my comments. At the college I was just at the gymnast girls were a combination of both....That said there were definitely some girls that were not super lean. However these girls still carried so much more muscle than even most of the other female athletes. However there were also some girls that could take my arm off! So i think its a mixed bag. I think the real thing to notice is how they are compared to other non-athlete girls and what they appear like aesthetically.