The Gymnast Nutritionist® Podcast
Jun 8, 2026 · 21 min · 10 segments
One of the biggest mistakes I see parents make isn't feeding their gymnast unhealthy foods. It's assuming their gymnast's calorie needs are similar to other kids their age. Today we're talking about…
Christina AndersonHostSo if you don't know what a calorie is, a calorie is actually just a measurement of how much energy or food gives off when it is, you know, used for energy in the body.
And to get really nerdy on you, in order for scientists to measure how many calories or how much energy a food has, they actually blow up the food in something called a bomb calorimeter, and that is how they measure energy.
Now, it's one thing to quantify, you know, how many calories you're giving someone.
And a little bit of an aside, there actually have been some really interesting research studies where they have overfed people by 1,000 calories plus a day, and some people gain weight, some lose weight, some stay the same, and that's a really important study that just points to, you know, our bodies are not always just this straightforward, super simple math equation.
And that kind of study has been done in adults, which is very different than working with children and adolescents whose nutrition needs are so much more dynamic.
So one of the biggest mistakes I see parents making is, it's not that they're feeding gymnasts unhealthily, it's just they're assuming that their gymnast needs the same amount of calories as their other children or other children their age.
And in our last episode, we talked about growth and why, you know, eating healthily is not a guarantee of adequate nutrition.
So we're gonna take it a step further today and talk about calorie needs, not because, um, I want you to count calories for your gymnast, but I know that a lot of you are trying to Google this information, you're trying to ask AI, and it's giving you incorrect information that you don't necessarily have enough context to know whether it's right or not.
And even before AI, you know, we've, we've been working with gymnasts exclusively for almost seven years now.
And parents all the time, they just want to know, "How many calories does my gymnast need," right? Like, they may have experienced themselves counting calories, tracking macros, doing whatever.
They would not need to work with anyone if they just knew how many calories their kid needs.
But the problem with that is, one, it's really hard to estimate, but two, it is dynamic.
And so what your gymnast needs is gonna be different this summer, next summer.
It all depends on kinda where your gymnast currently is with growth and development, with training, their health status, what's happening during upgrade season, so on and so forth.
So if you don't know what a calorie is, a calorie is actually just a measurement of how much energy or food gives off when it is, you know, used for energy in the body.
And to get really nerdy on you, in order for scientists to measure how many calories or how much energy a food has, they actually blow up the food in something called a bomb calorimeter, and that is how they measure energy.
Now, it's one thing to quantify, you know, how many calories you're giving someone.
And a little bit of an aside, there actually have been some really interesting research studies where they have overfed people by 1,000 calories plus a day, and some people gain weight, some lose weight, some stay the same, and that's a really important study that just points to, you know, our bodies are not always just this straightforward, super simple math equation.
And that kind of study has been done in adults, which is very different than working with children and adolescents whose nutrition needs are so much more dynamic.
So one of the biggest mistakes I see parents making is, it's not that they're feeding gymnasts unhealthily, it's just they're assuming that their gymnast needs the same amount of calories as their other children or other children their age.
And in our last episode, we talked about growth and why, you know, eating healthily is not a guarantee of adequate nutrition.
So we're gonna take it a step further today and talk about calorie needs, not because, um, I want you to count calories for your gymnast, but I know that a lot of you are trying to Google this information, you're trying to ask AI, and it's giving you incorrect information that you don't necessarily have enough context to know whether it's right or not.
And even before AI, you know, we've, we've been working with gymnasts exclusively for almost seven years now.
And parents all the time, they just want to know, "How many calories does my gymnast need," right? Like, they may have experienced themselves counting calories, tracking macros, doing whatever.
They would not need to work with anyone if they just knew how many calories their kid needs.
But the problem with that is, one, it's really hard to estimate, but two, it is dynamic.
And so what your gymnast needs is gonna be different this summer, next summer.
It all depends on kinda where your gymnast currently is with growth and development, with training, their health status, what's happening during upgrade season, so on and so forth.
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