Simone Biles trained about twenty hours a week at fourteen. Aimee Boorman, the coach who set that number, explains why it was not forty.

Aimee met Simone in 2003, when Simone was six years old, at Bannon's Gymnastix in Houston, and coached her for the next thirteen years: three world all-around titles, four Olympic gold medals in Rio, and never more than thirty-two hours a week in the gym. She is a four-time USA Gymnastics Coach of the Year, the 2016 U.S. Olympic Committee Coach of the Year, an FIG brevet judge, and the author of The Balance: My Years Coaching Simone Biles, with a foreword by Simone. Since Rio she has coached internationally, including with the Dutch team at the Tokyo Olympics, and she judges, coaches and mentors from Arizona.

Gina and Aimee are friends, and this is a conversation between two people who have spent years on the same side of the same argument: that the way to get the most out of an athlete is not to use her up. It is the most practical hour the show has recorded, and it is full of numbers, every one of them smaller than you would guess.

In this episode:

• What a training week looked like for Simone at fourteen, and why "she is superhuman" is the wrong explanation
• The most hours she ever trained, all the way through Rio, and what the extra hours were actually for
• Three beam routines a session, four full floor routines a week, and the assignment with a ceiling: hit three in a row, or make five, or do seven and we are done
• Why Aimee thinks that if Simone had been old enough for the 2012 Olympics, there would not have been a 2016
• "Let them get out of it": the pet peeve she has with coaches, and the one situation where it turns into "look deeper"
• The teenager who shouted "I just have PMS" across the gym, and why her coach loved it
• The one skill they decided was not worth the risk, and why the reason was a podium, not an ability
• Tokyo from the end of the vault runway: what she saw on Simone's first step, and what the people around her got right
• Three things a coach should never say to a kid who is scared of a skill
• Am I going to be the coach who breaks her, and the line that answers it: there had been Simones before Simone

Aimee Boorman judges, coaches, mentors and speaks from Arizona.

The practitioner directory, the gymnastics sports medicine certification for healthcare practitioners, and every episode's show notes are at medgym.net.

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Chapters

0:00 The coach who kept Simone Biles at twenty hours a week

1:40 About twenty hours a week at fourteen

5:51 Beam numbers: three in a row, five total, seven and we're done

9:45 Lesson plans, diaries, and following the athlete

12:06 Twenty to thirty-two hours, and what the national staff saw

15:31 The Balance: the whole person, including the coach

20:35 Pacing a prodigy: 2012 would have been the end of her

27:39 Working backwards off the calendar

31:58 The shoulder, and "let them get out of it"

32:59 "I just have PMS"

37:24 The Yurchenko triple they walked away from

39:35 "There had been Simones"

40:11 Soreness or injury, and making the numbers safer

45:22 Hang, don't tap, and back up on the podium

47:19 Tokyo: the first step, and failing safely

52:32 Three things never to say to a scared kid

54:04 The state of the sport

59:44 Where to find Aimee