Yeah, Hi, I'm olympic gold medalist simone biles and I'm debunking some misconceptions you guys have about gymnast, we asked on instagram about misconceptions and assumptions you guys have about gymnast, I broke them down into three categories.

Sport lifestyle in the Sikh, so gymnastics is not a sport, I hear this a lot, but I feel like every four years everybody tunes in to watch gymnastics, so it's got to be a sport at least out of all the sports, gymnastics is probably the most competitive right now.

I trained 32 to 34 hours a week just to compete for about three or four minutes.

It's all sports combining one, you can't just be fast, you have to have like agility, you have to be able to jump, you have to be able to flip memorized routines, it's kind of all in one Gymnasts usually retire at an early age in gymnasts have a short career.

That's not technically true because we can do it um whenever we go to college and get like N.

C.

W.

scholarships.

So I guess we all kind of retire around 22, You have to be rich to get into the sport.

Our lessons expensive.

It actually is a very expensive sport and it has to do it.

It's also a year long.

We don't have a season and then we can take a break and you kind of have to train your whole entire life for it.

So yes it does get to be expensive.

You can't start gymnastics later in life.

I was six years old almost seven and that's already typically late because usually you start in Mommy and Me classes or as soon as you can walk you can't be afraid of heights as a gymnast, you actually can, but it doesn't affect you in the gym when you're flipping because you don't notice how high you are.

So I feel like that was kind of a myth.

No, I'm not really afraid of heights.

I'm just afraid of, if I'm somewhere high, I'm going to jump off, I don't know why I have that fear, I don't want to die.

I just want to jump off due to me being a professional athlete, gymnast, I try to stay away from those extreme sports, bungee jumping, skydiving, none of that till your career is over.

I've done zip lining um and I was only allowed to do it because you're strapped in.

You constantly have a wedgie from your uniform.

Yes, I know you can't get wedgies, but usually you just pick them beauties of pains, so where we get over it.

So G K Ali designs all of my uniforms and I have a little line with them and so I think that's really exciting because I get to design the leos that I compete and training is more mental than physical, I would say it's 50 50 every trick comes naturally and they do not struggle at all.

That's false because on some skills it's taken me like over a year to learn.

So it all doesn't come naturally.

There's actually two skills I can think of.

One is a to catch up on bars that took me like a year to learn and another is a double double on floor, which also took me like a year to learn the to catch if I was scared and I used to like fall really crazy and then double double, I would just get lost in the air.

So it took me a long time for my air awareness on that skill lifestyle.

They are not very nice and super competitive in all aspects of life.

I'm actually not very competitive at all in the gym or like in a competition, my goal is never to win, it just Kind of happens.

But I also feel like whenever you're at the top everybody like praise on your downfall, which is really strange to me.

My sister did gymnastics until she was about like 17, she was level nine gymnast training Littleton, she was really good, she quit because of the pressure and everybody compared her to me and she used to win a lot of the competitions to, and then people thought that wasn't fair and she was just tired of people talking about it whenever she went to competitions, like her sister always, when she always wins, that's not fair.

So she quit.

They're intimidating to men.

I feel like at a young age, yes, because I feel like our muscles develop way quicker than other kids our age, especially like in middle school you don't see boys beefing up to 16, 18 till they hit puberty, but even before girls hit puberty, we gain muscles.

So we're typically stronger than the men in our age group.

So yes, so before I started dating my boyfriend, he didn't know who I was.

Yes, it actually was.

No, we don't have to talk about it, it's fine.

He's competitive at games and in life in general, but I'm not, but whenever I beat him, I make it known that I beat him because it just gets on his nerves.

Um can I be not nice sometimes, but probably if I'm tired and hungry, but that's just everybody.

But I feel like people also think gymnasts are really mean because most of the time were so serious that you really don't see our personality all work.

No play.

Yes and no, I guess we can play after work.

I've learned that I have to feel myself outside of the gym to whether that's hanging out with family, friends, going shopping or doing whatever.

I still have to be happy at the end of the day with or without gymnastics.

My mom always made it a note to do family vacation.

So they would take me and my sister out of practice anyways and we would go.

One of my favorite places to go on vacation is believed the food, the water, the people, everything.

Whenever I do things I'm not supposed to when I post them, I get in trouble.

One time we went to believe that I was doing double flips off this platform and I got in trouble for that.

But the internet thought it was cool.

I like to nap.

I feel like at this age that's like fun for me, they have to wake up at four a.m. Every day.

I don't wake up at four am I wake up at like 6 15 just because we start practice at seven and if I had to wake up before, I wouldn't go to the gym, they grew up only going to gymnastics gym and didn't have time to socialize slash date.

I actually went to Public school up until 8th grade, which some people never go to public school or some people do public school their whole entire career.

But yeah, once you get to a certain level and you start training more hours, you don't really have time to socialize.

Therefore probably don't know any guys, so you probably don't date and I didn't.

So all of my friends actually came from gymnastics or at least around that world.

This one tendency to be depressed as a result of their young age and pressure to compete.

I was never depressed as a kid.

I was actually very happy because I feel like you don't really get pressure to compete well till you get older, but it also depends on your parents and your coaches and my parents just always let me have fun um, and be myself in and out of the gym.

So as I got older you have to take mental days or whatever, but I've probably only taken like to ever, so not really for me, I go to therapy and I think it should be talked about a lot more because it's not something to be ashamed or afraid of, Everybody has something different that works for them and that's what I just found works for me, physique, they have body image issues, I feel like that's not a misconception about gymnasts, I feel like that's everybody in general, everybody struggles with body image issues, wanting to look different, thinking you're not skinny.

Um I feel like that's everybody in life, you have to have a certain body type to be a gymnast back in the day.

Everybody had a more like slim body and was really flexible and skinny, but now you can be a little bit shorter and more powerful like me, so I definitely think it's evolved, so I think that's false as well.

You have to be skinny, petite to do gymnastics.

I feel like whatever your body type is, you just have to be in shape to do gymnastics, they can never grow above a certain height.

Some gymnasts are like 5658 which is really tall.

For gymnasts, not for a normal person, but for a gymnast, if you walk into the gym, the tallest person on the team is probably 54 Think it's different now.

Everybody thought bar swingers were a little bit taller leaner, and then if you're like a tumbler, you're a little bit shorter and thicker.

But now it's been proven that you can kind of have both body types and do all of it, so it doesn't really make a difference anymore.

But let me tell you, you gained £3 is a little harder to swing on the bars.

They're very flexible.

No, not all gymnasts are flexible.

Me and Ali Raisman were actually not that flexible for gymnasts because our muscles kind of overlap that, but were flexible enough to do what we have to do.

I'm olympic gold medalist.