What is Youth Athletic Development?

Youth athletic development is the deliberate and systematic development of physical skills in children, specifically children K-8th.

Youth athletic development serves three main purposes:

1.       Provide children with positive movement experiences so they begin to develop a positive relationship with activity.

2.       Develop physical literacy, coordination, and fundamental movement skills in children so they can have future sporting success and live happy, healthy, and active lives.

3.       Develop their physical skills during critical windows of opportunity when children are highly adaptable and those skills can be maximized.

To develop these skills, children should be trained like children, not mini-adults. Children do not need repetitive training programs targeting specific body parts or muscle groups, they need games, friendly competition, and fun challenges that holistically develop their physical literacy, coordination, and fundamental movement skills.

Thankfully, our Little Athlete Academy is designed with these goals in mind. Our programs are fun, safe, and effective, allowing our athletes to play their way to physical literacy, coordination, and future athletic success.

You can see for yourself at the following link: https://www.instagram.com/p/CoOTQCYui_9/

Three Tips to Improve Balance in Children

Last week, I explained why balance is so important to youth athletic development. If you missed it, then you can check it out HERE. This week, I want to give you three tips to develop balance with your kids.

1.       Stand on one foot while brushing your teeth (or doing any other mundane/daily habit such as watching tv or doing the dishes). Challenging them to incorporate balance into their daily tasks are simple to implement and will pay huge dividends in the long run.

2.       Try a new sport or hobby. New sports and active hobbies bring new movement challenges and new balance requirements. Trying a novel movement activity will force the body to adapt to these new stressors. Some less-common sports that really challenge and improve balance are:

a.       Hockey/Figure-Skating/Ice-Skating

b.       Dance

c.       Martial Arts

d.       Rock-Climbing

e.       Gymnastics

As a side note, these five sports are some of the best to develop physical literacy, coordination, and athletic development in children as they challenge the body in ways that align with deliberate youth athletic development. In our Little Athlete Academy, we pull the best aspects from all of these sports and combine it with our own movement-principles to provide young athletes with everything they need to develop optimally and live happy, healthy, and active lives.

3.       Get them off the screens and playing outside. All of the games you and I played as kids helped us passively develop our balance, and unfortunately, kids no longer play the same games. Tag, hide and go seek, kickball, pickle, catch, relay races, and simply exploring outside are all activities that passively develop balance.

There you have it, three tips to develop balance in your children to prepare them for future athletic success and set them up to live happy, healthy, and active lives.

If you are interested in a more deliberate approach, check out our Little Athlete Academy, where we provide young athletes with the best-possible training experience. It may be the best decision you ever make for them.

Three New, Fun, and Overlooked Activities Your Kids Will LOVE this Winter (And you will too!)

With the new year behind us and winter in full-swing, if you’re like most parents, you may be struggling to find new, fun, and engaging activities for your kids this winter. Snow brings sledding, snow-angels, forts, snow-men, and skiing/tubing/snowboarding if those are your things. Winter, however, also limits many common outdoor activities that kids enjoy, and not only is snow required to take advantage of those aforementioned activities (and if you live in New England, sadly, we hardly get snow anymore), they also get old and stale fast, with kids foregoing them in favor of more stimulating screen-time. With that in mind, I wanted to share 3 New, Fun, and Overlooked activities that your kids will LOVE, and you will too because it gets them moving, laughing, and having the time of their life. Fun Fact: if you choose to participate, they will love these activities even more because they secretly yearn for you to participate with them.

1.       Laser Tag. Cheap, easy, and unbelievably fun. Laser tag is SO MUCH FUN. I had the chance to play this summer for the first time in my life, and couldn’t believe how much fun I had. I played three fifteen-minute games, and each game felt like it was 90 seconds. Beyond that, it’s also one heck of a workout. Forty-five minutes of constant moving, cutting, crouching, and reacting to other players will leave you sweaty, smiling, and sore. Jump in with your kids for a great workout, a fun time, and a happy child.

2.       Indoor Rock Climbing. Another activity I just recently took up, rock climbing is one of the three best activities (outside of our Little Athlete Academy) that kids can participate in to maximize their underlying physical literacy and coordination. The body movements used while climbing (hanging, pulling, pushing), are some of the fundamental components of our Little Athlete Academy programming. Beyond the physical advantages rock climbing provides, it also builds fearless and resilient kids, teaching them how to persevere through failure and experience genuine gratification when they do succeed.

3.       Ice Skating. Grab the skates, head to the local rink, and go for a twirl on the ice. Not only does ice skating challenge kids’ balance, coordination, and stamina, it also opens the door to winter sports like hockey or figure skating. New to skating? No problem. Most rinks will have tools to make it easier to balance while learning that can slowly be taken away as your/your kid’s balance improves (kind of like training wheels on a bike!).

There you have it, 3 new, fun, and overlooked activities that your kids will LOVE this winter that gets them out of the house, away from the screens, and moving in a way that develops their physical literacy.

Interested in maximizing their athletic development this winter? Check out the following link to learn more about our Little Athlete Academy and set them up for future athletic success: Little Athlete Academy

Your Fall Season’s Over…So Now What?

As the weather gets colder and fall seasons come to a close, I want to take a few minutes to discuss some viable next-steps for the winter depending on your age, goals, and ability level, to improve at your craft and come back next fall ready to take the world by storm.

First, let me make something extremely clear. I am adamantly against early specialization. For those that don’t know, early specialization is exactly what it sounds like, specializing in one sport at an early age/early in athlete’s development. Early specialization has become a huge problem in this country for many reasons, and is far too expansive a topic to dive into in this blog, but be on the lookout for deceptive coaches pushing athletes to specialize early for their own financial gain. Without going too deep, early specialization leads to overuse injuries, a lack of physical literacy, coordination, and movement development in children, and early burnout.

With that in mind, it’s hard to pinpoint an exact age or ability that children should begin to specialize in one sport, because in an ideal world, they never would. Playing multiple sports allows them to develop their athleticism safely, utilize different muscles/movement patterns, and be introduced to a plethora of different stimuli that force them to solve new problems. Not the mention they will develop great social and character skills by playing multiple sports.

With all that being said, in today’s cut-throat sporting landscape, it’s hard to feel like you child isn’t falling behind if they aren’t investing copious amounts of time/energy to their sport, and it sort of makes sense. At the end of the day, consistent effort will most likely breed success, so the more consistently an athlete invests effort into their sport, the more they will develop. While this principle bears out, an athlete must train smartly to ensure that he/she is developing appropriately and avoiding the common errors of early specialization and winter training.

So, with that context established, let me give you some viable options for this winter to continue to develop without worrying about putting your child at risk or in harms way.

1. If your child is younger than 14 years old, get them in some sort of movement-based program, martial arts, or gymnastic-type training to compliment their primary sport. The components of these kinds of activities will build the fundamental movement skills and coordination athletes need to have success in their sporting endeavors, while doing so in a fun, exciting, and safe environment. Putting your child in a program like this is far and away the best thing you can do as a parent for their long-term athletic development.

2. If your child is 14 or older, get them in some sort of formal strength and conditioning/athletic development program. Do NOT allow them to join the gym on their own, where they will develop bad habits, put themselves at risk to be injured, and most likely set back their athletic development, making them worse at their primary sport. At this age, training harder is not always the best option because athletes typically don’t know what they are doing. Training with smart coaches who will keep them safe, teach them lifting principles, and get them comfortable in the weight room, is a much better option.

3. Look for a 1-2 day/week sport-specific program. Here’s where the magic of balance truly happens. Once your child is playing a different sport/enrolled in some sort of movement/athletic development program, find a program where they can work with a coach 1-2 days/week for sport-specific development. I would steer clear of anything more than 2 days/week, and 1 day/week truly is the sweet spot. It’s the spot where athletes can continue to invest effort and improve in their primary sport, without being subjected to the risks of early specialization.

There you have it. Hopefully you now have a clear picture of what to look for this winter, and what to steer clear of, if you hope to continue your child’s development in their primary sport. As a conclusion, I want to give you as a parent a quick checklist to follow to simplify this process:

1. Enroll child in secondary sport.

2. Depending on age, enroll child in some sort of movement development/athletic development program with a coach who will keep them safe and develop them properly.

3. Enroll child in 1-2 day/week sport-specific development program.

If you want to inquire about working with us for any of these services, please do so HERE.

Thanks for reading, we hope to work with you soon to safely develop your child and allow them to reach their athletic potential and dominate their sporting endeavors.

Until next time,

-JL