The MedGym Podcast

Gina Pongetti
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Health & Fitness

Gymnastics, dance, and figure skating ask the body to do beautiful, impossible things - and rarely talk about what that costs. The MedGym Podcast is where that conversation finally happens. Hosted by physical therapist Gina Pongetti Angeletti, it's an honest look at health in the sport: the mental, the physical, and the training that ties them together. Every other Thursday, Gina sits down with the athletes, clinicians, and coaches who actually live it - for real talk about injury and comeback, fear and confidence, fueling, burnout, longevity, and what it takes to stay whole in a sport built on perfection. No spin, no highlight reel. Just the stuff nobody explains until you need it.

Episodes

  1. 6d ago

    Knowing What to Ignore

    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 insteadThe first question he asks a patient, which is not where it hurtsWhy he says nobody has ever felt better or been cured by an MRI, and what a two page scan report actually tells youThe seven million people over sixty five walking around with a rotator cuff tear they will never know aboutWhat actually predicts whether physical therapy works, which is not the size of the tearWhy ACLs almost never tear in the first quarter, and what film of NFL knees showed when they went looking for different mechanismsWhat PRP and stem cell injections really do, from the surgeon who chairs the board that governs their ethical useGina on baseline testing, and why the only jump height that matters is the one you had beforeA Volkswagen body with a Ferrari engine, and the fourteen year old brains making adult decisionsWhy he thinks of himself as a waiter, and what he wants you to do before your next appointmentDr. 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.

    Knowing What to Ignore

  2. Sep 3

    Do What You Know How to Do

    Jaycie Phelps did not make a single routine in warm-ups at the Olympic Games. Then she led off for the Magnificent Seven. She was sixteen, first up on the night the United States won its first Olympic team gold in gymnastics. What her coach Mary Lee Tracy said to her in the seconds before she saluted is the title of this episode, and it is still the sentence she coaches from thirty years later. The rest of the conversation is what came after. Three knee surgeries, including a cadaver meniscus transplant no gymnast had ever had, and a doctor who told her she would never compete again before helping her map the comeback anyway. She finished on her own terms. Now she runs the Jaycie Phelps Athletic Center in Indiana, where every athlete is tested once a month and the whole program is built on the idea that confidence is a training effect rather than a personality trait. Leading off at the Olympic Games with zero warm-up hits, and the thing a coach says that makes a routine possible anywayThe comeback that was supposed to be impossible: three surgeries, a cadaver meniscus, and a doctor who mapped out how many punches she had leftHer actual assignment sheet, from fall preseason to the week before regionals, and how it flexes for the athlete having a rough dayWhy athletes hide pain, and what they are really protecting when they stay quietConfidence as a training effect: the numbers-to-consistency-to-swagger chain her gym runs onWhy skills get harder and more dangerous as an athlete gets weaker, and what monthly testing catchesThe year and a half after Atlanta when seven teenagers were rock stars, and what nobody prepared them forRepeating a level as a strategy rather than a setbackThe moment at thirteen when she nearly quit

    Do What You Know How to Do

  3. Aug 20

    The People Already Moving

    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 worldThe overtraining thread running through nearly every injury he sees, and the season his soccer program had six hip labral injuries instead of oneWhy "back in four months" is not an ACL plan, and what functional testing and mental readiness screening replaced it withWhat athletes tell him after he asks the coach to step out of the roomBiologics, honestly: PRP, stem cells, the $2,000 shot insurance will not cover, and why an injection is not caulkThe Achilles warning signs most people train straight through, and the antibiotic risk factor almost nobody hears aboutSpecialization, wearables, and the duty that comes with choosing one sportRio 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.

    The People Already Moving

  4. Aug 6

    Four Seats in the Same Sport

    A lot of people leave this sport when the sport is done with them. Amanda Borden never left. She was captain of the Magnificent Seven — the seven women who won the first Olympic team gold in American gymnastics history, in Atlanta in 1996. But this conversation is about everything that came after. She built her own gym. She has now spent far longer coaching this sport than competing in it. And she raised a Level 10 gymnast of her own — her daughter Kennedy, who competes for Alabama in the NCAA next season. Athlete, coach, gym owner, gym mom: four different seats in the same sport, and she’s still in love with it. Gina and Amanda talk about what a healthy gym actually looks and sounds like on an ordinary Tuesday night, how you keep a gym joyful and still get kids to a high level, and what coaching your own daughter teaches you about coaching everybody else’s. In this episode: The captain's vote she did not cast for herself, and who she wrote down insteadWhat Mary Lou Retton told the 1996 team about the press, and the sentence Amanda walked into the Georgia Dome repeatingWhy "why is it tight?" is a better question than another hamstring stretch, and what her own coach taught her about asking itHaving a voice as an athlete: being able to tell a coach yes or no, and not be in trouble for the answerWhat a healthy gym looks and sounds like on an ordinary Tuesday night, and why you watch the adults instead of the kidsThe gap between medically cleared and actually ready, and what "you're good to go" misses about a gymnastTwenty beam routines a day, or two: coaching athletes with completely different capacities in the same gymCoaching her daughter Kennedy from Level 8 to Alabama, and the rule she set before any of it startedTelescope goals, microscope goals, and the ladder goal in between Amanda Borden coaches at Gold Medal Gymnastics in Tempe and Chandler, 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.

    Four Seats in the Same Sport

  5. Season 1 Trailer

    Welcome to The MedGym Podcast

    The athletes we love deserve better than we've given them. For 25+ years, physical therapist and sports-medicine specialist Gina Pongetti Angeletti has been the person athletes, coaches, and crying parents turn to on the competition floor when something hurts and no one can say why. After thousands of those conversations, she's opening them up to everyone. The MedGym Podcast is coffee talk with friends — the honest kind — about health in sport: why some athletes thrive while others quietly break down, and what it really takes to keep a body and a mind in the game. Across three pillars — mental, physical, and training — Gina gathers the best physicians, trainers, coaches, and clinicians in gymnastics, dance, and figure skating, plus the athletes who came out the other side whole, telling you how they did it. The why and the how behind it all, with a sprinkle of humor and a whole lot of heart. New episodes every other Thursday. One heart, one body, one child at a time.

    Welcome to The MedGym Podcast
  • 1 Trailer
    4 Episodes

Trailer

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

Gymnastics, dance, and figure skating ask the body to do beautiful, impossible things - and rarely talk about what that costs. The MedGym Podcast is where that conversation finally happens. Hosted by physical therapist Gina Pongetti Angeletti, it's an honest look at health in the sport: the mental, the physical, and the training that ties them together. Every other Thursday, Gina sits down with the athletes, clinicians, and coaches who actually live it - for real talk about injury and comeback, fear and confidence, fueling, burnout, longevity, and what it takes to stay whole in a sport built on perfection. No spin, no highlight reel. Just the stuff nobody explains until you need it.

Information

  • Creator
    Gina Pongetti
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    5
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Gina Pongetti