Shawn Johnson on how athletes recalibrate Olympic training

Yahoo Sports Olympics analyst Shawn Johnson breaks down how an athlete’s training schedule has to reset and change over the next year.

Video Transcript

SHAWN JOHNSON EAST: My initial reaction to the IOC officially postponing the Olympics was-- I still don't think I've digested it. I think it's obviously the right decision and something that we all can stand by because of everything going on in the world, but to see such a huge decision be made I think puts everything into perspective of what's going on. And just seeing the fallout of it for the athletes and everyone else around the world I think is pretty crazy.

The majority of these athletes have spent their entire lives training for this one month and this one year. They've structured years of training so that they peak and can perform the best of their ability at that exact minute in time. So restructuring a year's worth of training or a lifetime's worth of training with all these uncertainties-- not knowing where you're going to train, if your gym is open, if you have a coach that can train you right now. You don't know how long to rest. You don't know officially when the Olympics are going to be.

It's just-- it takes these perfectionists in their craft, and it makes them so uncertain about everything, and it-- I think it's going to be really hard for people to restructure that. But hopefully before long we'll know exactly when the Olympics will be, and people can start restructuring things so that they can put on the show that they have been dreaming to put on.

For a gymnast, training to peak at a specific time can take years. So you're progressively and foundationally building your skill set year after year after year, and you have to, as any athlete-- an elite athlete-- would do-- you have to have these dips and flows of intensity with training and rest time and letting your body heal and then pushing.

And for me at the Olympics, the year leading up to that, that month, that August competition in 2008, I went through my peaks and valleys so that I could rest right before the Olympics and kind of give it my go, my all right before that month. And all these athletes have that same structure and that same schedule that benefits their sport.

So now with everything restructuring and not knowing when that peak time needs to be, they have to figure out how to recalibrate their bodies and their sports. And, I mean, sports will continue to evolve in the next year, so people will have to add difficulty. And, you know, more competitors are going to come on the field that weren't ready and now have another year to train. So it's just everything's back up in the air that they have to recalculate.

I knew four years before the Olympics what competitions we were going to compete in, what ones I was going to try to get to, which ones I would skip so that I could rest to be ready for the Olympics because I knew that day and time was go time. Now since the Olympics are going to be in '21 and not in '20 and it's just this weird mix of events that we all have to figure out, it's going to be this-- I don't know, this new math equation that nobody's ever had to do before.

I mean, do you go to world championships? Do you use world championships as Olympic trials? Do you have your own Olympic trials next year on top of all of it? Do you try to let your athletes rest and skip worlds, and do you skip all the qualifiers? It's just we're in new territory. We haven't done this before.