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/

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

What Makes a Good Athletic Development Program?

Like coaching, strength and conditioning is an industry without best practices or professional standards. It’s riddled with different beliefs and opinions on the best ways to get results, and contradicting information runs rampant. Everyone from the 30 year veteran still writing programs like it’s 1980, to the unqualified fitness influencer citing sources from 1912 explaining how water is inherently bad for athletic development (yes, that actually happened), puts out information, muddying the water for those of us trying to simply do what’s best for our athletes. With that in mind, I want to lay out a few components that make a good (and safe) athletic development program, so that the reader can begin to understand what they should look for.

1. The program keeps athletes safe. As crazy as it sounds, this isn’t the first thing many coaches think of when building/designing their programs. Far too often, coaches have other priorities that supersede the athletes’ safety. Look no further than coaches who use fitness as a punishment to see that this mindset still exists. A safe program will be extremely simple and will feel like it’s building you up rather than breaking you down. Beyond that, safe programs won’t ask you to do anything you can’t currently do. They will meet you where you’re at and progress from there, rather than asking you to start from a level you aren’t ready for.

2. Speaking of progression, a good athletic development program will slowly and appropriately progress athletes. The idea behind a great program isn’t to crush athletes, it’s to apply just enough stress to stimulate adaptation so that their bodies can adapt at an appropriate rate. Over time, a good program will slowly apply more stress after the body has adapted to continue this progressive adaptation process, a process aptly named, “progressive overload.”

3. With that in mind, a good athletic development program will always feel manageable/attainable. Sure, it may be challenging, but it will never feel overwhelming. If you feel like it’s asking you to do too much, it probably is.

4. Check your sourcing. Avoid programs or tips that come from people who are not qualified to give them. Instead, look for tips and programs from people who develop athletes similar to you for a living and have a collection of success stories.

5. Lastly, and most importantly, a good program will put the athlete first. It doesn’t necessarily need to be personalized to you, but it needs to fit your needs. Make sure that the program you complete will actually help you reach your goals and improve your performance on the field/court/ice/etc.

Hopefully, sticking to these tips will help you weed out the bad information/programs from the good ones, and will allow you to reach your goals and have success in your sporting endeavors. If you want to avoid wading through the weeds all-together, simply contact us, and let us work with you reach your athletic potential.

The Importance of Unilateral Load

In a previous post, I highlighted some of the benefits of a high-quality strength and conditioning program for soccer players. In this one, I’d like to explain one of the core principles of my training approach/philosophy: Pushing Unilateral Load.

Soccer players tend to be averse to loading heavy. This stereotype stems from the professional level, where the focus is on fitness, and the fear of loading is widespread. These players (and coaches) have a lack of understanding of what load is and worry that loading heavy will make them slower and lead to injury. They perceive load as lifting as much weight as possible in the “big three” lifts (barbell squatting, deadlifting, and bench pressing), and I would agree. Lifting like a power-lifter will likely diminish their performance and lead to injury, as they are not replicating the demands of their sport. We have thankfully evolved from the early-ages of strength and conditioning, and when I say “pushing unilateral load,” I mean something entirely different than what they think.

I want my players to lift in a way that replicates the demands of the sport, thereby leading to an increase in transferability, and actually impacting and improving their performance on the field. Soccer players (and all athletes with the exception of rowers), “play” on one leg. Running, jumping, cutting, passing, shooting, etc., all occur on one leg and under intense force. Therefore, in order to reduce the rate of injury and improve performance on the field, we should safely and progressively replicate this off the field. The best way to accomplish this is through sprinting (which also occurs on one leg), and pushing unilateral load.

With this in mind, I shifted my programming, eliminating most bilateral lower lifts, and making unilateral lifts primary exercises rather than accessory exercises. This change has made a tremendous impact on the health and performance of the athletes I serve, and has become a staple of my programming approach/philosophy. My athletes get all the benefits of lifting heavy, without the wear and tear, risk, and other drawbacks of bilateral lifting.

Interested in experiencing this for yourself? Try replacing your lower bilateral primary lift with a unilateral equivalent for a month, and I guarantee you will feel an immediate difference and reap the benefits it provides. Better yet, schedule a meeting with us and start training in a way that will actually make a difference to your performance on the field.

Until next time,

-Jer