The twisties are caused by a sudden disconnect between the brain and body that makes a gymnast lose their sense of where they are in space mid-flight. It’s not a lack of skill or effort. It’s a sensory mismatch: the brain stops efficiently processing the feedback it needs to track the body’s position during flips and twists, and the gymnast loses the ability to make split-second adjustments to land safely.
The term entered mainstream awareness when Simone Biles withdrew from several events at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but the phenomenon has been known in gymnastics for decades. Understanding what triggers it requires looking at how the brain normally handles aerial skills and what goes wrong when that system breaks down.
How Your Brain Tracks Your Body in the Air
Gymnastics demands an extraordinary level of coordination between three sensory systems: vision, the vestibular system (your inner ear’s sense of rotation and gravity), and proprioception (your body’s awareness of where your limbs are without looking at them). During a twisting flip that takes less than a second, the brain fuses input from all three systems to build a real-time map of the body’s position, speed, and orientation. That map tells the gymnast exactly when to open up from a tuck, where to spot the ground, and how to adjust for landing.
Elite gymnasts develop a distinctive ability to blend proprioceptive input with visual information that sets them apart from other athletes. Research on postural control in gymnasts shows that when vestibular input gets disrupted (even something as simple as turning the head), gymnasts rapidly reintegrate proprioceptive signals across their body to compensate. This adaptability is built through years of repetition, and it’s what allows complex skills to feel automatic.
The key word is “automatic.” A triple-twisting double backflip happens too fast for conscious thought to manage. The brain runs the skill on something closer to a stored motor program, a deeply practiced sequence that fires without deliberate control. When that automatic loop works, the gymnast feels locked in. When it doesn’t, they’re lost.
What Happens When the Loop Breaks
During the twisties, the feedback loop between brain and body stops communicating efficiently. The gymnast launches into the air and suddenly can’t feel where they are. The internal map goes blank or delivers the wrong information. As Cleveland Clinic sports psychologist Dr. Sacco describes it, “there’s a disconnect in the feedback loop” and the gymnast loses their sense of position in space while airborne.
Simone Biles put it in starker terms: “If one day you woke up and you had no idea how to drive a car, your legs are going crazy, you have no control of your body. You’ve been doing something for so long, and you now no longer have control. It’s terrifying.” Olympic gold medalist Laurie Hernandez described it as a “stutter-step” in the brain, a half-second glitch that’s enough to throw off an entire skill.
That half-second matters enormously. A gymnast completing a twisting layout may be rotating at speeds where even a small timing error changes where they land, whether on their feet, on their head, or on their neck. This is what makes the twisties genuinely dangerous, not just frustrating. At that critical moment, the gymnast can’t make the corrections needed to land safely.
Why It Happens: Stress, Pressure, and Overthinking
The twisties don’t have a single clean cause. They sit at the intersection of psychological stress and neurological disruption, and for most gymnasts, the trigger is some combination of both.
The most common pattern involves a high-pressure situation, competition stress, public expectation, or personal anxiety, pushing the brain into a state of heightened vigilance. Under normal training conditions, the gymnast’s motor programs run below the level of conscious awareness. But anxiety pulls those automatic processes into conscious attention. The gymnast starts “thinking” about a skill that only works when they don’t think about it. This is sometimes called reinvestment: the conscious mind tries to micromanage movements that were delegated to automatic systems long ago, and the result is a kind of sensory traffic jam.
Researchers have also framed the twisties as a form of dissociation, a detachment from one’s sense of self accompanied by feelings of depersonalization and derealization. In this view, extreme stress causes the mind to partially disconnect from bodily experience. The gymnast’s perception of the external world and their own body becomes fragmented. Some sports scientists classify it alongside task-specific focal dystonia, the same family of neurological disruptions that causes “the yips” in golfers and baseball players. In those cases, a highly practiced motor skill suddenly becomes unreliable under pressure.
But pressure isn’t always the trigger. Some gymnasts report the twisties appearing during low-stress training sessions, seemingly out of nowhere. Fatigue, changes in routine, coming back from injury, or even subtle shifts in confidence can disrupt the brain’s spatial processing enough to set it off. The common thread is that something interferes with the unconscious, automatic execution of a skill that depends entirely on being unconscious and automatic.
Why Elite Gymnasts Are Especially Vulnerable
It might seem paradoxical that the best gymnasts in the world are the ones most affected by the twisties, but it makes sense when you consider the skills involved. A gymnast performing basic tumbling has more time in the air, slower rotation, and a wider margin for error. An elite gymnast performing a Yurchenko double pike has almost none. The more complex the skill, the more precisely the brain’s spatial map needs to function, and the less room there is for even a fractional disruption.
Elite gymnasts also carry a unique psychological burden. The expectation to perform at the highest level, often on a global stage, creates cognitive load that competes with the brain’s capacity to run motor programs smoothly. The intricate maneuvers of elite gymnastics demand a heightened integration of proprioceptive accuracy, spatial precision, and neuromuscular coordination. There’s very little bandwidth left over for anxiety to occupy before the system starts to falter.
How Gymnasts Recover
There’s no quick fix for the twisties. Recovery typically involves stripping skills back to their most basic components and rebuilding them gradually. A gymnast who has lost spatial awareness on a double-twisting layout might go back to practicing single twists, or even straight flips with no twisting at all, in a foam pit. The goal is to let the brain re-establish its automatic processing at a level where the stakes are low and the risk of injury is minimal.
This process can take days, weeks, or in some cases months. The timeline varies enormously and is difficult to predict. Some gymnasts describe a relatively quick reset once the pressure lifts. Others struggle with recurring episodes that force them to rethink their competitive routines entirely. Biles withdrew from events in Tokyo, returned to competition later, and eventually competed at the 2024 Paris Olympics, but that recovery spanned years, not weeks.
Mental skills training plays a role in both recovery and prevention. Visualization, controlled breathing, and mindfulness practices can help gymnasts maintain the relaxed focus that allows automatic motor programs to run without interference. Some coaches build “spatial resilience” by varying training conditions: practicing skills with different visual references, on different apparatus, or under mild stress to strengthen the brain’s ability to maintain its internal map when conditions change.
The most important factor, though, may be the simplest: removing the pressure to push through it. Continuing to attempt high-difficulty skills while the twisties are active is dangerous. The gymnast’s brain is literally unable to track where the body is during the most hazardous part of the skill. Biles’s decision to step back in Tokyo, widely debated at the time, reflected exactly what the phenomenon demands. When the brain’s spatial system goes offline, the only safe response is to stop asking it to do things that require it to be online.