Knowing which days to leave the routine alone

Aimee Boorman began coaching Simone Biles at a small gym near Houston when Biles was around seven years old. She stayed with her for the next decade, through three consecutive world all around titles and, in the summer of 2016, to four Olympic golds in Rio. When Boorman describes those years now, she keeps returning to a quality that is easy to miss because it looks, from the outside, like doing less.

She learned, early, to read Biles as she walked into the gym. Some days her gymnast was the world champion in the making. Some days she was a teenager who was tired, or bored, or upset about something at school. Boorman has said in interviews that the key to their long partnership was recognising which day was which, and adjusting the session accordingly. On the wrong day, the same routine could do real damage to a young body that had nothing left to give that day.

A coach who let the athlete be a person

In her 2025 memoir, The Balance, Boorman is candid that this approach was unusual in elite American gymnastics at the time. The prevailing culture around the national team, especially at the Karolyi ranch in Texas, prized training right up to competition and treated rest as a lapse. Boorman argued the other way, sometimes to the point of friction. In her view, Biles needed more recovery, not less. A bad session was information, not a failure of will. Some days the plan had to change because the person had changed.

The story she tells about the Biles family is a small one, but it holds the whole method. Early on, when it became clear that Simone had a level of talent Boorman had never coached before, Boorman went to Ron and Nellie Biles and told them something plainly. If she ever stopped being able to stay ahead of their daughter, she would help them find someone who could. That is not the sentence of a coach who is trying to hold on. It is the sentence of a coach who is trying to protect the athlete from her own coach's ego.

What she was noticing

In April 2025, Boorman gave an interview to the Associated Press. She revealed that Biles had experienced the twisties, the mid air disorientation on twisting skills that later forced her withdrawal from the team final in Tokyo, in the months before Rio 2016 as well. At the time, almost no one outside the gym knew. What Boorman did, quietly, was adjust the training. Fewer full routines. More of the underlying shapes done slowly. Time on other apparatus. She waited for Biles's body to know where it was in the air again, rather than drilling through the problem.

That is a particular kind of coaching attention. It is not the attention of the drill sheet, or the training peak. It is the attention of the person in the room who has watched this gymnast walk in every day for nine years and can tell, before the first vault, that today is a keep it small day. Most sports do not reward that attention publicly. It looks like nothing is happening. What is happening is that the athlete is being kept whole.

The handover

After Rio, Boorman moved to a coaching role in Florida, and later took on posts with the Dutch and German national programmes. Biles took eighteen months away from the sport, then returned with a different coaching setup and went on to win another all around Olympic title in Paris in 2024. The break was not a rupture. It was, in Boorman's telling, part of the same idea that had shaped the previous decade. The athlete's life is longer than any one coach's chapter of it, and a good coach designs for that.

Reviewers of The Balance have noted that Boorman is careful, sometimes almost apologetic, about her own role. She does not claim to have made Biles. What she claims is that Biles might not have stayed in gymnastics as long, or as happily, in a gym that treated her differently. That is a smaller claim, and a more honest one, and the kind of claim most long serving coaches have earned the right to make about most of their athletes, provided they have been paying attention.

Between sessions

Few of the coaches reading this are working with a generational talent. Almost all of them are working with a person who walks in on a Tuesday evening carrying whatever kind of day they have had. The Boorman method, translated out of elite gymnastics, is the habit of noticing. Was she quiet at the start of the last lesson. Did his shoulders drop when we moved on to the harder piece. Did she cancel twice in a row, and if so, from what.

None of that lives inside a single session. It lives in the space between them, in whatever the coach uses to remember. A notebook. A voice memo on the way back to the car. Two lines typed on a phone in the fifteen minutes before the next student. It is the same act Boorman describes: reading the person who has arrived, and adjusting the plan to fit them, not the other way around.

The gold medals, when they come, come from the same place the quiet Tuesdays come from. Someone was paying attention.