There are two distinct coaching styles in America today, the vertical progression profile method of coaching and the encyclopedic method of coaching, which is both vertical and horizontal progressions simultaneously.  Actually one and this recommended style. 

Narrow Training Is By Definition Not Broad-Based
The average coach in America trains only the skills and progressions directly and obviously for that year’s competition and to maximize the current code of points.  There are actually two sub-types of this vertical-only progression consisting of those coaches who primarily only teach the compulsory skills to be used in that season's competition and the results- hungry optional coach who has picked some particular high level skills and ignores everything but the immediate progressions to them.

Variety is The Spice of Gymnastics
This profile (narrow vertical training path) system of training invariably skips progressions, skill groups and results in a narrowly defined athlete with many gaps in their skills and technique.  The same skills and skill groups are drilled over and over without significant variety.  In this sense it is like nothing more than optional compulsories.  This boring program leads to burnout and dropouts.  Motivating athletes to do the same things over and over again is difficult.  Practice is viewed as necessary drudgery. 

Strength, Flexibility and High Level Skill Training
The former JEDP (Jr. Elite Development Program) sponsored by the USAIGC was such a profile program.  It turned out to be a tremendously successful program, in spite of its profiling limitations.  It was successful, not because its limited range of target skills and progressions was the right way to train, but because of its heretofore-ignored emphasis on strength, flexibility and conditioning female athletes.  It set a new standard for gymnastics strength and emphasis on high-level skill training in women's gymnastics in America.  It also succeeded because many of coaches used the system, not as their primary system of training, but as an adjunct training program.

The Successful Coaches Expanded the Program Themselves
 What those coaches did was combine both vertical and horizontal methods of coaching into an encyclopedic method of coaching.  They avoided the horizontal-only trap of compulsory only coaches. And they improved and expanded on the vertical only method by teaching their gymnasts every skill in the book.

Ignoring Was Not Bliss
 Optional profile coaches were in a hurry to get high level skills and attempted to cut corners anywhere they could.  Some JEDP gymnasts could not do basic skills that were outside the scope of the program.  One of the most obvious errors in the long-term value of such a program was shown when front tumbling skills, consistently ignored in the JEDP program were given prominence and higher degrees of difficulty.  JEDP-only gymnasts had to go back and start all over at the basics of front tumbling.

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