Digital Tariff Sheets: The Future of Competition Prep
Under the FIG (Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique) Code of Points 2025-2028, a competition card can be completed on paper or with an electronic system. That's not a hypothetical about where the sport is heading. It's already written into the rulebook: every element in an exercise, in performance order, with its difficulty value, handed to the Difficulty Judges at least two hours before the competition starts. The part of the process still stuck on paper for most gymnasts isn't the card itself. It's the weeks of drafting, checking, and revising a routine that happen before anyone fills that card in. A digital tariff sheet is that working document moved online: a routine builder that recalculates Degree of Difficulty (DD) the instant a skill changes, instead of a page that only gets re-added when someone remembers to.
"Tariff" isn't FIG's own word for it. The Code of Points calls it a difficulty value, recorded on a competition card. Coaches and gymnasts have called it tariff for decades anyway, and this article uses the term the same way the gym floor does.
What a Tariff Sheet Actually Has to Contain
FIG's rule for the competition card is specific: every element must be written down with its difficulty value, in the order it will be performed, described using the FIG numeric system, the digit-and-symbol shorthand that encodes flips, twists, and shape (o for tuck, < for pike, / for straight). Trampigo's own routine notation follows that same idea. A skill in the routine builder reads as digits and a shape symbol for exactly the same reason FIG's card does: so a routine can be written, read back, and checked without ambiguity.
Two things follow from this. First, DD is not the whole competition score. It's the technical-value pillar; execution, time of flight, and horizontal displacement are scored separately and none of them are what a tariff sheet tracks. Second, and this matters more for what a tariff sheet can and can't promise: the Difficulty Judges don't just accept what's written on the card. They independently determine and record the elements actually performed and their value. A tariff sheet, digital or paper, is preparation. It's not a guarantee of the score a judge will assign a real performance.
Paper Tariff Sheet vs Digital Tariff Sheet
The difference isn't paper versus screen. It's what happens the moment one skill in the routine changes.
| Paper tariff sheet | Digital tariff sheet | |
|---|---|---|
| Change one skill | Re-add every component by hand | Total recalculates immediately |
| Coach and gymnast copies | Two physical sheets that can drift apart | One shared link, same routine on both screens |
| Checking a total | Re-derive the FIG math from memory | Read the number the calculator already produced |
| Between-season reuse | Easy to reuse last cycle's values unchanged | Built against the current Code of Points cycle |
None of this changes what the competition card requires, or replaces it. It changes how many times a coach can safely revise a routine before that card gets filled in, because each revision no longer means re-doing the arithmetic from scratch.
A Worked Example: One Body-Position Swap, Recalculated
Take a short illustrative routine, four elements, not a full ten-element competition exercise, built to show what changes when one skill's shape changes late in training:
| Element | Flips | Twists | Position | DD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Barani | 4 | ½ | Tuck | 0.6 |
| Back somersault | 4 | none | Tuck | 0.5 |
| Full-twisting back somersault | 4 | 1 | Tuck | 0.7 |
| Triple back somersault | 12 | none | Tuck | 1.8 |
That's a total of 3.6. Now the coach decides the plain back somersault, the second element, should open into pike instead of tuck, a common adjustment once a gymnast's form is consistent enough to hold the shape. Nothing else in the routine changes:
| Element | Flips | Twists | Position | DD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Barani | 4 | ½ | Tuck | 0.6 |
| Back somersault | 4 | none | Pike | 0.6 |
| Full-twisting back somersault | 4 | 1 | Tuck | 0.7 |
| Triple back somersault | 12 | none | Tuck | 1.8 |
The new total is 3.7. That single tenth of a point comes from the position value: a plain single somersault with no twist earns 0.1 per completed rotation in pike or straight, a bonus tuck never earns. On paper, catching that requires remembering which of FIG's several position rules applies to this specific element (a twisting single, for comparison, gets no position bonus at all, tuck or not) and re-adding all four elements to be sure nothing else shifted. In Trampigo's routine builder, changing one skill's shape updates the total the same moment the shape changes, for this element and everything after it.
These four elements are illustrative, not a full competition exercise, and not a recommendation to perform them in this order. FIG doesn't award difficulty twice for a repeated element, so a real routine's ten elements are always distinct from each other.
Common Mistakes a Paper Tariff Sheet Makes Easy
Re-summing after a swap and dropping a term. The example above only moved a position value. A twist change on a multi-somersault element can also move the twist-excess bonus, a separate term that's easy to forget is there at all when re-adding by hand. See 5 Common Errors in Trampoline Tariff Calculation for the specific ways that bonus gets missed.
Two copies drifting apart. A gymnast's sheet and a coach's sheet are two different pieces of paper. One gets updated after a Tuesday session; the other doesn't, until someone notices the totals don't match a week later.
Carrying last cycle's values forward. FIG republishes the Code of Points periodically, and difficulty values can change between editions. A tariff sheet built against an old edition's numbers looks correct and isn't. Trampigo's calculator implements FIG Code of Points 2025-2028 specifically, not an average of editions.
Treating a high tariff-sheet total as a settled score. The Difficulty Judges record what was actually performed, not what was declared. A tariff sheet that says 3.7 is a plan; it becomes a score only once someone performs it and a judge confirms the elements and shapes matched.
What Changes in Training Once the Sheet Is Digital
The practical shift isn't a single easier calculation. It's that a coach can afford to ask "what if" more often. Swap a shape, add a twist, try a heavier triple earlier in the order, and see the total change before deciding whether the swap is worth training toward. A shared link means the gymnast sees the same routine and the same number the coach is looking at, without a second sheet to keep in sync.
That's also why a digital tariff sheet is worth keeping separate from the competition card itself. A routine builder can hold far more draft skills than a real exercise will ever use, since it's a planning space, not a submission. A competition routine is ten elements. The extra room in a digital tool is for trying things out before ten of them get locked in, not a change to what FIG requires.
Once the routine is set, build it in the DD calculator and check every component against the full DD breakdown before it's copied onto whatever card, paper or electronic, the competition actually uses.
Sources and Ruleset Note
This article uses FIG Code of Points 2025-2028, Trampoline Gymnastics, specifically the competition-card requirements (Part I and Part II, section on competition cards) and the FIG numeric system appendix, alongside the difficulty scoring rules in sections B and C. The full document is linked from the DD guide. Every DD value above was generated by running Trampigo's own calculator, which implements this exact edition. This covers individual trampoline for both men's and women's categories. It doesn't cover synchronized trampoline, execution deductions, time of flight, horizontal displacement, or the specific electronic competition-card systems individual organizing committees choose to run at their events.