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Gymnastics and Beyond aims to enhance athlete support

27 September 2022

Britain’s top gymnasts spend their career perfecting all kinds of acrobatic feats. But what about the leap into the unknown when that career ends? Maimee Titmuss-Morris, Performance Lifestyle Practitioner at the English Institute of Sport (EIS), tells us about ‘Gymnastics and Beyond’, a collaborative project between the EIS and British Gymnastics (BG).

The Performance Lifestyle (PL) team at the EIS has provided 20 years of athlete support, encouraging and facilitating athletes’ personal and professional development alongside their competitive sporting careers as they move on to, through and beyond the World Class Programme (WCP).

The PL team are always looking to enhance the support being offered, and that’s exactly what ‘Gymnastics and Beyond’ aims to achieve, after a fruitful collaboration between BG and EIS PL practitioners Lynsey Marsh and Maimee Titmuss-Morris.

Titmuss-Morris explained: “We probably started to have conversations about two years ago. At that point I was thinking, ‘What’s going on with transition? We need to enhance this process’ – and we had the idea for ‘Gymnastics and Beyond’.

“It’s important to get the language right around transition. It can be an exciting part of someone’s life, although it does present many challenges as well.”

One of the biggest challenges in this area is the age of gymnasts on the WCP, as they’re generally a lot younger than many other athletes.

“For the women’s Artistic Gymnastics, especially, some are Olympians at the age of 16, at the same time as balancing GCSEs and everything else,” Titmuss-Morris said.

“That tends to mean that they’re coming off the WCP in their 20s rather than in their 30s, when they’re still figuring things out. Often they haven’t had another job, they haven’t had as many different life experiences, they’re sometimes still living at home, [in contrast to] a 35-year-old who’s had a long career, has a better idea of who they are, that kind of thing.”

Another challenge was to ensure that this wasn’t just a PL project. While Titmuss-Morris believes that the increased gravitas of PL and projects like #More2Me have made it easier to get Gymnastics and Beyond off the ground now, rather than five or 10 years ago, she was keen to ensure that everyone involved in the WCP – the Performance Director, coaches and other support staff – shared the responsibility and got the right messages across.

Titmuss-Morris said: “We’ve had a lot of help with this, and Lynsey and I have worked really hard on making sure we’ve involved the right people and had the right conversations. We’re linking in with all the departments, our colleagues at British Gymnastics have been brilliant, and what it’s also done is pull us together.”

Gymnastics and Beyond comprises several elements:

  • A handbook, offering a transition timeline and guidance from the whole performance support team; Medicine, Nutrition, Strength & Conditioning, Performance Analysis and Psychology, as well as PL, have all contributed relevant information to aid transition
  • A one-to-one meeting to understand individual needs and priorities
  • Six months of PL support post-transition, with the potential to extend for up to two years through the PL Futures team;
  • Opportunities to gain paid work experience with BG and voluntary work experience with BG partners
  • A new BG Personal Development Award (PDA), which provides financial support for personal and professional development

Explaining those elements, Titmuss-Morris said: “The handbook is there as a resource to refer to, to gain clarity and a real understanding of what this transition period might look like. We want to make reference to it from induction because we need to be having this conversation [about leaving the WCP] early – it’s inevitable that at some point they’ll leave the programme.

“But as PL practitioners we’ll also work with them on this. During the one-to-one we’ll talk through the handbook and have a look at what it means specifically to them. The information in there is generic, but what’s not generic is someone’s transition, and that depends on where the conversation might go with us and the support we’ll provide.

“What’s important are the words [on the handbook] – Informed, Prepared, Empowered – as that’s how we hope people leaving the programme will feel. The handbook will give clarity on things like the transition timeline, what happens from them coming off the WCP, who they’ll receive information from, what meetings they’ll have, and their chance to reflect – we want to hear their voice so we can continually improve the programme for whoever’s next.”

She added: “[The work experience] is a huge thing, and it will be based on how long they’ve committed to the WCP. We’re piloting the work experience this summer – one of the athletes is doing a placement with British Gymnastics and it’s going phenomenally well. So the idea is then to be able to replicate that or pull out parts of that and tweak it.

“With the UK Sport PDA, athletes can use that for up to 12 months after transitioning off the WCP, which is awesome. We’ve added on another two years [after leaving the WCP], so they’ve got time to think and reflect on which direction they’re going in, what’s important to them, what qualifications they need. That’s a big part of Gymnastics and Beyond, and we hope it will go down well.”

Initial feedback from athletes and coaches has been overwhelmingly positive, and Titmuss-Morris says it “feels great” to be at the stage of putting it into practice and making a difference.

“I was an athlete myself, and this was the bit I really struggled with,” she explained. “I had no help with what that transition looked like and found myself in a really dark place. So personally and professionally, this matters to me.

“To know that there are opportunities, and there’s a better way of helping people through that time, I feel really proud, and it shows what you can achieve when you collaborate. It’s exciting now to be at the stage where we can roll it out and see the impact that it can have.

“Serena Williams’ words about not liking the word ‘retiring’ and it being about ‘evolution’ for her… that gave me goosebumps. I think that when you come off the WCP, for a lot of people it’s got negative consequences and connotations, but it doesn’t have to be.

“For a lot of people, it’s actually a celebration of ‘look how far I’ve come, look at what I’ve achieved, how I’ve developed, and look at where I’m going’, and that’s what we want to celebrate. We want to celebrate people going on to other really cool, impressive things.”

This could even be a template for other sports to try, Titmuss-Morris believes.

“Speaking to Jo [Harrison, Head of PL], she is absolutely buzzing about this and said it’s leading the way across the WCPs. So hopefully people will look at it and it will inspire others to do similar things.”

You can read more about Gymnastics and Beyond here. And for more information about the EIS Performance Lifestyle team, click here.

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