ABSTRACT
Analytic epidemiology uses the concept of "risk factors" in an attempt to characterize both the nature of the causes of injury and the probability of these causes being present and their magnitude. Injury definitions include several common concepts from medical trauma, while gymnastics may provide a separate and relatively new category of sports injury. Perhaps the most common definition of an injury is some harm to a body part that results in time lost from training and competition. The reason for a particular injury definition for gymnastics is that most gymnastics injuries are skill-specific. While descriptive epidemiology deals with who, what, where, when and how of injury, analytic epidemiology deals with the why of injury. Defining the concepts and structure of the ideas is a continuous process that can map a path around injury based on attention to the details provided by the epidemiological information.
