Ep 215: The Real Cost of Waiting to Fix Your Gymnast's Fueling

I was talking with a parent the other day and they were telling me how they were talking with one of the other parents in the gym about nutrition.

And the parent who has worked with us for a long time, it's like when you see it, you can't unsee it, right? So as they're watching their gymnast teammates struggle in the gym, especially when it comes to you know, overuse injuries, things like stress fractures and stress reactions.

You know, our parents know that more than likely there is a nutrition component because they know that when they started working with us, they thought they had to handle a nutrition for their gymnast.

They thought they knew what they needed to.

And then they quickly learned like they were missing some really massive crucial pieces.

And so as this mom and I were chatting, she was telling me how she has been like working on this gymnast mom for months to at least reach out to us and have a conversation about her gymnast and what's going on.

And she finally said, got the mom to agree and they're about to roll in the program.

And our client's mom was like, yeah, and you wasted the last five months and your gymnast could have gotten better already.

And I was like, girl, you said it, not me.

But I think this completely illustrates what I want to share with you today about how waning doesn't keep your gymnast at baseline.

If there is an underlying fueling problem, which most of the time there is, your gymnast is probably going to continue to accumulate nutritional and physical consequences while you wait.

And I think a lot of times in medicine, we have this wait and see approach and it sounds reasonable and it is often appropriate until it's not.

And I can tell you when you have a high level gymnast that's training 20 plus hours a week, wait and see often just leads to later detection of injuries, later nutrition support, and it taking longer to actually get them healthy.

And I hear this all the time.

I hear parents, you know, think about working on nutrition, but then they'll say, you know, let's see how she does when the season starts or, you know, she's growing.

So I think this is probably just normal or she's tired, but you know, gymnastics is a lot, school's a lot, you know, her skills are still coming together and sure her periods are irregular, but she just started it.

I don't think we need nutrition yet.

We'll deal with it if it's a bigger problem.

And then maybe we'll reach out in January if she's still struggling.

But the problem is the issues that these families come to us panicking about in January are the ones that were already showing up in September.

And the fact of the matter is that nutrition is just not a quick fix.

It is not something I can fix for your gymnast.

in two or three weeks, you know, once comp season is already here.

And so there really is a cost to waiting.

And sometimes that cost is another injury.