Tiago Bessa competed for Portugal for a decade, then looked at a stress-strain graph in a university materials class and realized the high bar he had swung on since he was four is a spring. Now he engineers gymnastics equipment at SPIETH.

Tiago is a mechanical and product engineer at SPIETH Gymnastics, the apparatus supplier for the 2026 World Championships in Rotterdam, and a former elite men's artistic gymnast who represented Portugal at European and World Championships. He speaks both languages: what an athlete feels on a piece of equipment, and what the physics says is actually happening.

This bonus episode is the engineering companion to Episode 06. Gina brings the body half of every answer, from knee torsion to the Achilles, and Tiago turns the questions back on her: how should a skill be planned so the body can survive it, and for how long?

In this episode:

• The moment in a materials science class when the high bar became a spring
• Why brand-new equipment is the slipperiest it will ever be, and why a new springboard is stiffer than a used one
• Sitting out the warm-up to watch: how the feel of the equipment changes routines at the last minute
• "We'll see how the day feels," the backup vault, and why that is the smartest answer an athlete can give
• What is inside a landing mat: three layers, three jobs that pull against each other
• Why the closest mat in the gym is not always the right one
• When a softer mat is not safer: twisting landings, a stuck foot and the knee
• How a spring floor stores a landing and gives it back, and what that means for the Achilles
• Possible and sustainable: twenty years of floors, and the skills they made possible
• Gina's three rules before adding a skill, and why heel raises are not enough

Tiago Bessa is a mechanical and product engineer at SPIETH Gymnastics.

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

New episodes of The MedGym Podcast every other Thursday. If this one is useful, send it to a coach, a parent, an athlete or a practitioner who needs it.

Chapters

0:00 Welcome: feel and physics

1:33 Three generations of gymnastics

2:47 The high bar is a spring

4:02 Between the coach and the engineer

6:05 Gina's own turning point

8:52 What athletes miss: load management and physics

11:22 By feel: when the equipment doesn't feel right

13:22 He sat out the warm-up to watch

14:16 Why brand-new equipment is slippery

15:22 The backup vault: "We'll see how the day feels"

17:43 Friction, the slider and testing to the standard

21:30 Every gymnast preps the beam their own way

23:49 What's inside a landing mat

27:48 The closest mat isn't the right mat

30:04 Three reasons to change the mat

32:26 From the drawing board to the drop test

39:12 What a landing is protecting

41:25 Softer isn't safer when you're twisting

43:02 The Achilles question

47:45 A spring floor gives it back

50:36 Possible and sustainable: twenty years of floors

53:21 Planning a skill two years out: Gina's three rules

57:25 Physics lessons: the shin, the ankle and the Achilles

59:44 Thirty degrees shy, over and over

1:01:55 Pain is pain

1:04:15 One thing to carry out of today

Every gymnast at Worlds lands on the same mats, swings on the same bars and punches off the same boards. Jan Stechmann and Jeanette Wörner of SPIETH, the company that built them, spend the hour on what nobody watching at home thinks about.

SPIETH has been building gymnastics equipment since the 1950s. It made the tension springboard that debuted at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, has supplied twelve Olympic Games, and is the apparatus supplier for the 2026 World Championships in Rotterdam. Jan Stechmann is managing director of SPIETH America and runs the company's business across Germany, Canada and the US. Jeanette Wörner is head of sales and marketing at SPIETH Gymnastics in Germany.

Gina recorded this two days before Rotterdam opens, as the trucks were arriving. It is a physical therapist's tour of the equipment: what "bouncy" actually means to a body, why foam wears out where everyone lands, how a floor is built so it never comes apart under a triple full, and what a gym can check tomorrow.

In this episode:

• Fifteen to twenty trucks, two podia and seven sets of equipment: what it takes to load in a World Championships
• Why nobody at Worlds competes on brand-new equipment, and who breaks it in first
• What "bouncy" means as ground reaction force, and why 78% back versus 85% throws off a landing
• How a new springboard gets dropped on a thousand times before an athlete ever touches it
• The question every gym owner asks a supplier, "how long does it last?", and Jan's answer: what are you doing with it?
• When did you last lift the carpet? The safety check most gyms never do
• Vorspannung, the German idea that the equipment works with the gymnast, not against her
• Inside a competition floor, from the concrete up: a sandwich, and a puzzle
• Cable tension on bars and rings, measured instead of guessed by whichever coach set the bar
• Why the podium feels different, and why the first few rounds of podium training are about over-rotation
• The skill Jeanette still holds her breath for

Jan Stechmann and Jeanette Wörner are with SPIETH Gymnastics, the apparatus supplier for the 2026 World Championships in Rotterdam and the equipment supplier for the LA 2028 Olympics.

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

New episodes of The MedGym Podcast every other Thursday. If this one is useful, send it to a coach, a parent, an athlete or a practitioner who needs it.

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.

New episodes of The MedGym Podcast every other Thursday. If this one is useful, send it to a coach, a parent, an athlete or a practitioner who needs it.

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

Dr. Brian Cole operates on professional athletes for a living. Four out of five people who walk into his office will never be operated on at all.

He is an orthopedic sports medicine surgeon at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush, a professor at Rush University Medical Center, and team physician for the Chicago Bulls, the Chicago White Sox and the Joffrey Ballet. He has published more than a thousand articles, he has spent twenty five years building the evidence base for cartilage restoration, and in 2025 he won one of the biggest research awards in orthopedics for his work on joint preservation.

He also trademarked the phrase "spare the scalpel," which is an unusual thing for a surgeon to build a practice around.

Gina and Dr. Cole have worked together for more than twenty years, and this is a conversation between two people who send each other patients. It is less an interview than an argument they both already agree on: that the hardest part of this work is never the operation, and that most of what shows up on a scan was never the problem.

In this episode:

• Why no more than twenty percent of the people in his office will ever have surgery, and what the other eighty percent get instead
• The first question he asks a patient, which is not where it hurts
• Why he says nobody has ever felt better or been cured by an MRI, and what a two page scan report actually tells you
• The seven million people over sixty five walking around with a rotator cuff tear they will never know about
• What actually predicts whether physical therapy works, which is not the size of the tear
• Why ACLs almost never tear in the first quarter, and what film of NFL knees showed when they went looking for different mechanisms
• What PRP and stem cell injections really do, from the surgeon who chairs the board that governs their ethical use
• Gina on baseline testing, and why the only jump height that matters is the one you had before
• A Volkswagen body with a Ferrari engine, and the fourteen year old brains making adult decisions
• Why he thinks of himself as a waiter, and what he wants you to do before your next appointment

Dr. Brian Cole practices at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush in Chicago.

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

New episodes of The MedGym Podcast every other Thursday. If this one is useful, send it to a coach, a parent, an athlete or a practitioner who needs it.

When a gymnast lands badly, the camera goes to her face. Dr. Mark Hutchinson is one of the people already moving.

He has been one of them at six Olympic and Paralympic Games, three of those as head physician for all of Team USA. He is a distinguished professor of orthopedics and sports medicine at the University of Illinois Chicago, head team physician for UIC Athletics, and his first Games was Atlanta in 1996, the same summer the Magnificent Seven won gold across town.

He and Gina have shared patients for years, which is why this conversation moves fast and goes deep. Two clinicians who have worked the same Games, the same athletes and the same arguments, on what it actually takes to keep an athlete whole.

In this episode:

• Why elite sports medicine is a communication job before it is a surgical one, and how you earn the right to say "they need water"
• What changed in thirty years, from coaches who trained without water breaks to a Team USA mental health program that leads the world
• The overtraining thread running through nearly every injury he sees, and the season his soccer program had six hip labral injuries instead of one
• Why "back in four months" is not an ACL plan, and what functional testing and mental readiness screening replaced it with
• What athletes tell him after he asks the coach to step out of the room
• Biologics, honestly: PRP, stem cells, the $2,000 shot insurance will not cover, and why an injection is not caulk
• The Achilles warning signs most people train straight through, and the antibiotic risk factor almost nobody hears about
• Specialization, wearables, and the duty that comes with choosing one sport
• Rio 2016, the Final Five, and the moment he remembers best, which has no medal in it

Dr. Mark Hutchinson practices at the UIC Sports Medicine Center in Chicago and can be reached at hutch@uic.edu.

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

New episodes of The MedGym Podcast every other Thursday. If this one is useful, send it to a coach, a parent, an athlete or a practitioner who needs it.