Episode 1671 - Gymnastics modifications during pregnancy #PTonICE Daily Show

Dr. Jessica Gingerich // #ICEPelvic // www.ptonice.com 


In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, #ICEPelvic faculty member Jess Gingerich discusses the sport-specific nature of gymnastics to the fitness athlete, introduces the strict pull-ups, considerations for when to modify, including the rack pull-up and box-assisted pull-up.
Take a listen to learn how to better serve this population of patients & athletes or check out the full show notes on our blog at www.ptonice.com/blog.
If you're looking to learn more about our live pregnancy and postpartum physical therapy courses or our online physical therapy courses, check our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION
JESSICA GINGERICH
Good morning! Hello, my name is Dr. Jessica Gingrich. I am on faculty with the ice pelvic division here at ice. And today we are going to jump in to treating the pregnant athlete during gymnastics. So gymnastics is a broad term and it encompasses a lot of different movements that are utilized in a lot of different sports. So sports like gymnastics, kind of what we typically think of like with the beams and the floor routines and the uneven bars. That's what we typically think about. We also have cheerleading and we have yoga and trampoline, um, um, stuff, um, and CrossFit. So CrossFit is what we are going to focus on today. There are many movements in CrossFit that are under the term gymnastics. So we have pull-ups, we have handstands, we have toes-to-bar, we have muscle-ups, rope climbs, and even things like pistol squats are considered gymnastics. And of course these movements can be done either strict or kipping. The term gymnastics is defined as physical exercise used to develop and display strength, balance, and agility, especially those performed on or with an apparatus. You will see a lot of things on social media around the dangers of kipping movements within the sports of or in the movements of gymnastics. You may even think that yourself. And so what I want to do, I want to challenge you to reframe how you view kipping. So we're not going to talk about this today, the kipping, uh, any kipping movements. I'm going to talk about that next time I'm on the podcast, but I want you to start thinking about this because this is sports specific, right? So let that sit for a second.

GYMNASTICS IS SPORTS-SPECIFIC FOR SOME PATIENTS
We talk about sports specific as physical therapists all the time. So if you are talking to an athlete and you're talking about how dangerous and how funky it looks or whatever, it is part of their sport. And you see it in CrossFit and you also see it in gymnastics. We don't tell the baseball player or the baseball pitcher specifically to stop pitching, even though his arm goes through a really gnarly range of motion and kind of looks funky in those pictures once they're slowing down. What we do as physical therapists is we prepare them. We prepare them from a mobility perspective, a strength perspective. We talk about things like programming, sleep, nutrition, stress management, and we try to maximize their recovery so they can maximize their performance. So I wanted to mention this before we dive in to what we're going to talk about today, because I'm going to talk about it later. And then also during pregnancy, we also get that same language, right? We get the language around something being unsafe or dangerous, and it's simply just untrue. It's more about preparedness. So pregnancy does not mean that you have less of an athlete in front of you. So what does it mean for our pregnant athletes that want to com