The Four Phases to a Gymnastics Season & How to Support Your Athlete Through Them

The competitive season for athletes and parents comes with a predictable pattern of emotions and challenges. Understanding the natural flow of a competitive season and what to expect as the season progresses can be extremely helpful for parents when navigating their child’s sports journey. Oftentimes our athlete’s energy level, engagement or enthusiasm ebbs and flows with the natural course of the season. Knowing this pattern can help parents discern what is a true cause for concern and what is a normal part of the year. There are four phases to a gymnastics season: Upgrade Excitement, Competition Launch, The Messy Middle, and End of the Year Express. Each of these phases holds important victories and challenges. Understanding this can help you as a parent to help your child get the most out of their competitive year.

Upgrade Excitement: When the season first starts the energy is fresh. Athletes are primed to learn, to dream and to set goals.The blank canvas of a new season makes anything seem possible and the excitement of that possibility sets the energy for the first few months. Gymnasts are learning new skills and building strength. They are trying new skills and making progress on old ones. There is no competition looming and the only measuring stick is the feedback from coaches on how to continue progressing toward the goal. New routines are learned, new friendships form and lots of fun is had. 

Victories: This is often the favorite part of the season for both gymnasts and coaches. The freedom from competitions and the challenge of upgrading skills provides a renewed love of the sport mixed with an upbeat energy of all that is possible. 

Challenges: The challenges in this time include mental blocks on new skills and practice consistency. Upgrade Excitement usually happens during the summer and vacation schedules can often interrupt the flow of progress.

How to help: Embrace the excitement and highlight the intangibles needed for this time of the season. Point out to your gymnasts that they are brave to be willing to learn new skills, resilient to try again when the inevitable failed attempts happen and they are gaining strength that will serve them well all year long.

Competition Launch: This is the time of year where the upgrades are turned into skills gained, and routines that have been learned are now being polished. This time of year has a countdown clock running to the first couple of meets and fine tuning becomes a priority. Form and connection are the currency of this time period. Gymnasts are often asked to refine skills they have recently upgraded and the focus becomes how well the skills can be performed. Full routines become a regular part of practice and the judges at the first few meets get to give initial feedback on how it is all coming together. The first two meets serve as calibration points and changes are made based on that feedback. 

VIctories: Gymnasts finally get to show off all their hard work to their fans! They have been working for months learning and perfecting skills. This is the time of year where performing the skills has an added excitement. The return to competition often allows gymnasts to truly reflect on how far they have come and get real time information on what they still need to be working diligently on. 

Challenges: There is an added pressure to competition that does not exist in the Upgrade Excitement time of the season. Gymnasts who tend to be anxious about competition or our innate perfectionists may struggle a bit with the return to competition. Their desire to do well can often lead them to forget all the progress they have made. 

How to help: The best strategy for this time in the season is to validate and ask questions. Gymnasts need no advice on how to do better, they have their own internal voices telling them that. What they need is validation that what they are doing is hard, scary or just plain awesome. They also need to be able to sort through their thinking. This is where questions can be game changing. Helping the gymnast to ask themselves what is working for them, what isn’t working and what they would like to do about it can be key. Helping them self discover the answers will lead to more lasting positive results in both practice and on the competition floor. 

The Messy Middle: This is the point in the season where gymnasts are too far into competition for it to be exciting anymore and too far from the end of the season to feel like they should enjoy every moment. This is the Messy Middle. It is messy because this is where fatigue mixes together with pressure, both internal and external. Medals, placements and scores give enough feedback for gymnasts to know what is going well and what is not. How gymnasts and parents receive that feedback can impact how much stress or pressure the gymnast feels during this time. Gymnasts continue to work on fine tuning and elevating skills. The Messy Middle can make it hard to see the progress that is being made and the internal critic can often speak louder than the internal cheerleader. Fatigue of winter, school and gymnastics seasons often sets in. This can make problems seem bigger, progress seem slower and the process is now so routine that it can start to feel mundane. While this can be the most challenging time for gymnasts, it is also the most critical time in the season. This is where gymnasts learn the biggest lessons in resilience, the importance of mindset and the ability to overcome. 

Victories: Multiple meets during this time means the chance for victories, medals and opportunities to show off. Gymnasts have the ability to perform in different venues and against different teams. This means that they gain experience in different areas and they have the opportunity to succeed in different environments. Progress is visible through video review now. You can see how much better the routines have gotten since the first meet and how much confidence has been gained. 

Challenges: Gymnasts can start getting down on themselves. They may forget what progress they have made or they may be struggling with injuries or mental blocks that have set their season on a different path than expected. This can lead to feelings of high pressure, disappointment or failure. Fatigue can also play a role at this time. Whether physical or mental fatigue, the struggle is real and making changes can be more difficult because of the frequency of meets at this time. 

How to help: The first step to helping at this point of the season is reminding your athlete that they are in the Messy Middle and all of these feelings are completely normal! It is the most challenging part of the season and it is part of the process. This is often where growth happens and the most significant life lessons are learned. Overcoming the Messy Middle provides gymnasts with an evidence list that proves that they are capable of doing hard things. Acknowledging this time in the season and validating the difficulty can be powerful for our athletes. When they know the struggle is able to be seen by others, they often become even more determined to overcome. This season can also be used to teach gymnasts to take extra care of their bodies and their minds. Help your gymnast do an audit of how healthy their current sleep, food and hydration patterns are and make adjustments accordingly. 

End Of Year Express: This is the time of year where you don’t want to blink or you will miss it! We are on the downhill part of the rollercoaster. The meet season is coming to an end. States, Regionals and Nationals become the focus. The fatigue of the Messy Middle has shifted to excitement for the last meet of the season, the hopefulness of Upgrade Season is returning and the beginning thoughts of what next season may bring. This is the time for leaving it all on the mat. Throwing the skill, going all out and being extra brave. Gymnasts can finally start to see how far they have come and how much they have accomplished. The pressure of competition lifts with the final meet. They are once again super humans back to challenging themselves to do really cool things. The gratitude for teammates, coaches and the journey takes center stage as they travel toward the banquet and the final practices of the year.

Victories: The journey is complete! You and your gymnast survived the competitive year. Whether it was the best of times or the worst of times, they will be arriving at the end having more experience, more knowledge and more information about themselves. Their successes and their challenges will now become a part of their story and they will build on those moving forward. 

Challenges: Each gymnast’s interpretation of their year is going to be unique to them. Where you see successes, they may see failures. Where you see growth, they may find disappointment that they didn’t hit the expectations in their mind. Gymnasts are often their own worst critics and being able to find the good can often be a challenge, especially if the season didn’t go the way they wanted.

How to help: The best thing a parent can do in this phase is give the gymnast time and space to process, rest and reset. The beginning of this part of the season requires a great deal of mental and physical energy. Creating time for rest and recovery after that part is critical. That time refuels our gymnast physically, mentally and spiritually. It also allows for gymnasts to have distance from the sport to see how much they have accomplished.