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.

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.

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.

• Leading off at the Olympic Games with zero warm-up hits, and the thing a coach says that makes a routine possible anyway
• The comeback that was supposed to be impossible: three surgeries, a cadaver meniscus, and a doctor who mapped out how many punches she had left
• Her actual assignment sheet, from fall preseason to the week before regionals, and how it flexes for the athlete having a rough day
• Why athletes hide pain, and what they are really protecting when they stay quiet
• Confidence as a training effect: the numbers-to-consistency-to-swagger chain her gym runs on
• Why skills get harder and more dangerous as an athlete gets weaker, and what monthly testing catches
• The year and a half after Atlanta when seven teenagers were rock stars, and what nobody prepared them for
• Repeating a level as a strategy rather than a setback
• The moment at thirteen when she nearly quit

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.

In this episode:

• The captain's vote she did not cast for herself, and who she wrote down instead
• What Mary Lou Retton told the 1996 team about the press, and the sentence Amanda walked into the Georgia Dome repeating
• Why "why is it tight?" is a better question than another hamstring stretch, and what her own coach taught her about asking it
• Having a voice as an athlete: being able to tell a coach yes or no, and not be in trouble for the answer
• What a healthy gym looks and sounds like on an ordinary Tuesday night, and why you watch the adults instead of the kids
• The gap between medically cleared and actually ready, and what "you're good to go" misses about a gymnast
• Twenty beam routines a day, or two: coaching athletes with completely different capacities in the same gym
• Coaching her daughter Kennedy from Level 8 to Alabama, and the rule she set before any of it started
• Telescope 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.

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.