HELP!!! Research on Gymnastics and affects on growth!!!

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gymnastics does not affect growth adversely or negatively. gymnastics makes strong bones. paper complete. A Plus for you!:)

and gymnastics does not stunt your growth...:)
 
gymnastics does not affect growth adversely or negatively. gymnastics makes strong bones. paper complete. A Plus for you!:)

and gymnastics does not stunt your growth...:)

And next you're going to say basketball doesn't make you tall.
*5'3" ex gymnast, has a 6'1" basketball playing sister*
 
Stunted mine...looking at my developmental charts, my growth follows the typical pattern (albeit at a lower than average height) and then flatlines when the typical curve keeps going up around age 13, when I started competitive gymnastics. Correlation =/> causation, but I can't think of any other major life changes around that time.
 
Stunted mine...looking at my developmental charts, my growth follows the typical pattern (albeit at a lower than average height) and then flatlines when the typical curve keeps going up around age 13, when I started competitive gymnastics. Correlation =/> causation, but I can't think of any other major life changes around that time.

research shows that it delays growth, it doesn't stunt it.
 
Stunted mine...looking at my developmental charts, my growth follows the typical pattern (albeit at a lower than average height) and then flatlines when the typical curve keeps going up around age 13, when I started competitive gymnastics. Correlation =/> causation, but I can't think of any other major life changes around that time.
I don't think everyone always follows a perfect growth curve, it could just be that your body leveled out at around 13. I don't think I've grown since I was 14/15, even after I was forced to quit gymnastics. My brother was always a very tall child and, based on growth charts, doctors predicted he would ultimately be over 6'. His actual height? 5'10ish. He was a high level competitive swimmer, and if you look at high level swimmers, it's not a sport known to affect growth- it's pretty typical for swimmers to be tall. Growth curves are just a prediction and lots of people, regardless of physical activity, don't follow that exact trajectory.
And while it can delay growth, as gymgal mentioned, I think another poster in a different thread cited some research that even for that to happen an athlete needs to be training mega hours at a pretty early age (does anyone else remember that? I don't think I just made that up...)
 
The sport doesn't effect your growth. The diet some people force on the kids they want to have a specific body type can have adverse effects. I've run into far too may folks that think a kid with more than 5% body fat can't do gymnastics. These are the ones that hurt kids' growth. My daughter that did gymnastics is 4'11". My other daughter is 5'1". Gymnastics had nothing to do with it. My wife is 4'11" and she never did any sport. I'm 5'4" but I did do the whole keep wait down for wresting thing. I might be an inch or 2 taller if I hadn't starved myself that season. I have a brother that's 6'3" and his son is now 6'5". Guess he got the growth that I missed :).
I also know a lady that is 5'11" and she competed up through level 9 until she couldn't swing between the bars very well anymore.
 
I think another poster in a different thread cited some research that even for that to happen an athlete needs to be training mega hours at a pretty early age (does anyone else remember that? I don't think I just made that up...)

That was me. The research shows that girls who are training in the 15-20 hr range *before* puberty begins tend to have delayed puberty which also means delayed growth spurt in terms of height. But this does not tend to happen in girls who begin to train hard after they have already started puberty. Of course these are generalizations. Everyone knows someone for whom this is not true. It also depends on body fat before puberty begins. Girls with much less than average body fat are more likely to have delayed puberty compared to girls with average or above body fat.



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I commented on other threads before. I think the reason for the correlation is because smaller kids tend to gravitate toward gymnastics - just like taller kids gravitate to basketball. My dd had/has delayed puberty but would of regardless of the sport. She was always small, well before starting the sport. She has visited the endocrinologist multiple times and through bone age scans it was determined that her bone age was about 2.5 yrs behind her chronological age. She was coasting along at about the 25% height until about age 11ish, then she fell to the 3% range. But this was in comparison to a generalized chart that the government put out. The reason for the fall was that while most kids are hitting their pre-pubescent growth spurt, my child who was also 11 (a couple months shy of 12) still was chugging along with bones the age of a 9.5 yr old. Nothing changed with her growth (for her own body), just some chart said she should be growing, but it is just a general thing.

Now, my dd is 15 in the past 2 yrs she has grown 6" and gained close to 30# - she's now a whopping 5' tall and weighs about 101#. See she is now at the tail end of puberty, she may still grow another inch or 2, but I wouldn't doubt it if it didn't happen until she was done the sport, if it happens at all. She was always projected to be about 5' tall by the Endo anyways. I guess I will just throw in here that she trains 20+ hrs a week and has been doing this for about 5 yrs now.

As long as the child is not sickly all the time, I wouldn't worry about being small. Doctors always worry about a small child, never an excessively tall child, but always think there is something wrong with a small child. Sometimes genetic short stature is just genetic short stature! A simple bone age scan can put things into perspective, it's also non-evasive, so a kid won't freak out getting one.
 
I agree, I think girls who happen to just quit gymnastics when they get taller. I was a short kid for most of my life and then at 13 I just had this magical growth spurt and actually grew about 3-4 inches in a year :O So during that growth spurt doing gymnastics was a little harder but I got used to it and doing gymnastics at 5'4" wasn't really hard at all.
 
My daughter's pediatrician said that it can delay puberty, but once they stop, their growth and development will catch up.
 
I almost think that it's the opposite. Shorter people are more likely to compete in gymnastics because it has it's advantages like not hitting the low bar in giants. It might stunt your growth, but the main reason most gymnasts are small is because they were small to begin with. I've always been at the very bottom of the growth chart, even before I started doing or competing in gymnastics.
 
I almost think that it's the opposite. Shorter people are more likely to compete in gymnastics because it has it's advantages like not hitting the low bar in giants. It might stunt your growth, but the main reason most gymnasts are small is because they were small to begin with. I've always been at the very bottom of the growth chart, even before I started doing or competing in gymnastics.

hitting the low bar is an end result of poor technique...not because your tall.:)
 

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