Gymnastics athletic development
The gym builds the skills. Somebody has to build the athlete underneath.
Gymnastics families give more hours than any sport asks. Almost none of those hours go to the strength that decides whether the skills — and the body doing them — hold up.
Here's something interesting
Watch a practice. Every rotation is skills — bars, beam, tumbling, vault.
Now watch what the skills actually demand: a sprint at the vault, force through the wrists, a dismount landed from height on growing knees and ankles. The skill is the visible part. The athlete underneath is what pays for it.
Build that athlete deliberately — strength for her stage, landings that absorb, power that's earned — and every skill gets safer and closer.
What we do
Most gymnasts train skills relentlessly. Very few follow a structured plan for the athlete doing them.
We measure how your gymnast actually moves — jumping, landing, sprinting, and strength for her stage of growth.
Then we train what the numbers point to, in doses a growing body can absorb, alongside the gym's own schedule — never on top of it blindly.
We coach gymnasts from 8 to 18 — in person across North Carolina's Triangle, and online for families further afield.
It begins the same way for every family: with a baseline.
See how Evaluation Day works
Where to begin
- Parent Resource Center — plain-language answers about developing a young gymnast.
- Power & the vault run — the sprint hiding inside gymnastics, and why strength decides it.
- Landings & resilience — dismounts are landings from height. What protects growing joints, explained.
- Measured results — before and after numbers from real athletes.
- Programs — how training with Athlete Academy works.
What it has produced
- 150+ athletes earned college scholarships
- 100+ went on to Division I programs
- 14 High School All-Americans
- 13 National Team members
My daughter was a young gymnast with big goals. We knew that to give her a chance at reaching them, she needed to add a strength and conditioning program to her training. We saw improvements in her strength, quickness and confidence — all so important in gymnastics — and I believe adding a strength program helped keep her healthy. Aaron created a challenging program but kept things fun.
I came to Aaron to increase strength and fitness to help further an elite gymnastics career. What mattered most was a consistent conditioning routine and nutrition education — strength and power building, plus prehab and maintenance to keep my body feeling its best. He was able to modify and focus on what my individual needs were.
Questions parents ask
My gymnast already trains 16 hours a week. Why add more?
Not more — different, and often instead of an optional hour. Gym hours build skills; almost none of them build the strength and landing control the skills sit on. A small, well-placed dose of athletic development makes the sixteen hours safer and more productive — and we coordinate the dose with her gym schedule, never stack it blindly.
Do gymnasts really need strength training? The sport already builds strength.
Gymnastics builds remarkable bodyweight strength in some positions and leaves real gaps in others — posterior chain, single-leg control, landing absorption. Those gaps are exactly where overuse shows up. Filling them is the point, and it is measured, not guessed.
When should a gymnast start athletic development?
There is no magic age — there is a right dose for each stage. Younger gymnasts work on movement quality and landings; maturing gymnasts earn progressive strength. A baseline measurement tells us the stage, and the dose follows.
Will strength training stunt my gymnast’s growth?
No. The National Strength and Conditioning Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have both reviewed this: supervised, progressive strength training has no adverse effect on growth or growth plates in young athletes. Both statements are linked below. In gymnastics the real load on growth plates is already there — in the dismounts, the tumbling, the wrist impacts. Strength is what helps the body absorb it.
Where this comes from
The strength-and-growth answer above is not our opinion. Both bodies below reviewed the evidence and reached the same conclusion.