Today on the podcast we are continuing the popular series of the Q&A's, answering people's questions directly from the community. In this episode, we're going to dive into injuries. I get a ton of questions from parents, coaches, medical providers, asking about different gymnastics injuries. I took five of the most popular questions that I had received that come up a lot from different people and tried to go through them and give my best advice. This particular episode is going to answer a lot of people's questions that they have about prehab and back injuries, shoulder injuries, and return to sport.

I ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS:

Josh asks: Many of the boys that I coach are starting to get shoulder problems, two have been diagnosed with labral tears in their shoulder, what prehab exercises can I do to prevent this?

Amy asks: My daughter is 12 years old and is starting to complain about lower back pain when she tumbles or does beam back walkovers. She's also working a lot of yurchenko’s and back handsprings on beam for her series and thinks that is where it started, what can we do about it?

Anonymous asked: I'm a medical provider working in the NCAA and Achilles injuries, including Achilles tears continued to be a huge problem for our team. Given your experiences and the new research projects, you guys have put out what should we be doing to help reduce this risk?

James asks: I'm a PT who is working with a lot of gymnasts, and all of them seem to struggle with knee or ankle-related pain during landings. What can we do as medical providers to help this out? I feel like as soon as the rest and are getting better, two months later, they are back in my office with the same type of pain.

ALSO…

Kara asks: What is your process for getting a gymnast safely back to training, there isn't any great literature on return to sport guidelines? And it's really overwhelming to do as an athletic trainer working with gymnasts.