Five Thirty Eight discusses the early developmental timeline of female gymnasts and includes commentary from Ellen Casey, MD, sports medicine physiatrist at the Women's Sports Medicine Center at HSS, and a team physician for the USA Gymnastics Women's National Team. 

Dr. Casey explained, “Gymnastics has been a very late adopter, if at all, of a lot of the parameters that other athletes are tracking, like workload and sleep and mental readiness.”

Dr. Casey underscored the need for gymnastics to embrace science and start collecting data on itself so that best practices can be established — as well as guidelines on how to intervene to improve training and development.

She explained the importance of age, puberty and psychological development as factors for young gymnasts. “I think it’s certainly worthy of exploring, or at least figuring out, at what point in maturation might be ideal to start learning certain types of skills or introducing certain types of training, because chronological age is one factor,” she noted.

Read the full article at Fivethirtyeight.com.