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Miami Palmetto High School junior Mila Jaramillo is a Level Nine gymnast. She drives up to Boca Raton almost every day to practice. Competitions are upstate or out of state. Her goal is to earn a college scholarship through gymnastics.
Jaramillo started a podcast for gymnasts called Flips N Tips as her community service project.
“I wanted to help the gymnastics community,” she says “There are a lot of issues that go on day to day. And I want to erase those issues. Young gymnastics stay quiet. It can be awkward to bring it up to adults. Dealing with situations in the gym or with coaches or awkward moments with parents that gymnasts don’t want to tell the parents about.”
On her podcast she interviews other gymnasts, coaches, and other experts. She wants to ensure the young gymnasts feel safe to bring up the difficult topics.
“That’s the goal. I interview other gymnasts and experts to get the idea across, that this should be talked about. How could they have gone about it better? It’s based on my own life experience.”
Jaramillo has been a gymnast since she was two.
“I’ve been doing this podcast since the beginning of August 2024,” she says. “It’s being received very well. I put a lot of flyers up at my gym. And people think it’s interesting.
Even people who don’t do sports think it’s interesting. That feedback is important for any sports.”
She tells fellow gymnasts that they have to prioritize themselves.
“Especially this day and age,” she says. “No young gymnasts should be taking anything from anyone.”
Simone Biles has become a spokesperson for mental health in the gymnastics world.
Jaramillo says the issues Biles has dealt with in the past are important to talk about.
“I want to educate the community,” she says. “Even if one person is doing it, things aren’t going to change if multiple people don’t speak up and change the rhetoric.”
She interviewed a neurologist about sleep and recovery from practice.
“He’s a sleep specialist,” she says. “He was an athlete in high school and college. He was a soccer player. For me sleep is a priority. Sleep is so essential to do what I do every day.”
She practices for four-and-a-half hours daily, plus she has school. A lot of kids just skip sleep and try to function, but she says that doesn’t work for her. She makes sure she sleeps eight hours a day.
“I’m trying to get a therapist who specializes in pelvic floor exercises,” she says. “It’s an issue for gymnasts tumbling. The pelvic floor become weak because of the repetitive tumbling. It’s an easily resolved thing. It’s an easy thing to do.”
While a podcast sounds easy to put together, it’s not. She has to schedule guests in a manner that’s convenient to both and her schedule is jam packed. Competitions are scheduled from January to May, and she participates in eight to ten a year.
Then she has to edit the interview.
“The editing process is extremely lengthy,” she says. “And putting it on the platforms takes time. Like it’s on every streaming platform.”
But she has discovered she loves doing the interviews.
She plans to tape a lot of the podcast episodes this summer.
Her schedule doesn’t leave her much time to participate in school clubs, but she does compete in biotechnology for HOSA. She’s also in the National Honor Society.
For college, she’s looking at schools with great biology programs and gymnastics teams.
She’s interested in a career in medicine, possibly as a medical researcher or biologist.
Linda Rodriquez Bernfeld
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