Young Athlete Programming Modifications   By Wil Fleming   When I first started training I figured out quickly that the best coaches developed programs ahead of time. They approached each session with a clear picture of their goals for a young athlete and designed a program that would accomplish those goals.   As [...] read more

    Younger Athlete Push Ups Exercise     By Dave Gleason   Teaching the push up to a younger athlete can be arduous and complicated depending on physical maturity, body awareness, current skill and or experience. Let’s face it, in most scenarios the younger athlete has had no instruction, incomplete instruction or instruction with [...] read more

  Young athletes hip turn whole-part coaching By Dave Gleason   Coaching any exercise to young athletes can be challenging. One of the most effective methods is to break down an activity into its component parts, often times all the way down to the smallest or simplest part possible.   This is very true when [...] read more

It’s great to watch a video or DVD and see what a quality training session is supposed to look like.   I always enjoy having exercise photographs at my fingertips with a visual representation of what each rep should look like along the way.   I also adore being able to read key information about [...] read more

  Training Young Athletes Resource I’ll be blunt with a message heading into your weekend:   If Complete Athlete Development is not in your library of educational resources, you are sorely missing out. DVD Collection of Coaching Cues, Training Programs & Exercise Selections Manual with Specifics on Speed, Agility, Coaching, Philosophy of Training Audio CD’s [...] read more

  The IYCA forces you to answer the question with young athletes, “Why”?   … But doesn’t ask you to play Monkey-See-Monkey-Do:     An Organization That TEACHES You What You Need to Know for young athletes… read more

Young Athletes & Coordination Series Here is the third and final portion of ‘Young Athletes & Coordination’:   (3) Teenage Athletes Are ‘Too Old’   Now, while there is truth to the matter that many of the sensitive periods for coordination development lay during the preadolescent phase of life, it would be shortsighted to suggest [...] read more

    Young Athletes Long Term Athletic Success The key ingredient to working with pre-adolescent and early adolescent young athletes is providing global stimulation from a movement perspective. Younger athletes must experience and eventually perfect a variety of motor skills in order to ensure both future athletic success and injury prevention. Developing basic coordination through [...] read more

Our standards have sunk.   Do you realize that?   The fitness industry creates nonsense aerobic-style classes for children and the vast majority of professionals claim them to be useful because "at least it gets kids moving"   Now understand, I’m the biggest proponent in the world of the "something is better than nothing" way [...] read more

    Correcting Young Athletes Technique   With young athletes who exhibit poor technical quality on a particular exercise or group of exercises, the best method of offering correction is often to become less dogmatic or predictable in your teaching method.   When teaching the squat for example, most Trainers and Coaches tend to take [...] read more

    Training young athletes and kids is so much more than just the ‘x’ and ‘o’ factors.   Of course a strong base of knowledge in pediatric exercise science, motor skill development and program design is critical for you to truly create effective training and conditioning agendas for this specific demographic.   But here’s [...] read more

    Youth Training Programs Most Trainers and Coaches don’t have a clue.   That isn’t meant to sound horribly negative, just something I’ve noticed a lot recently.   I was reading a textbook on Youth Training Programs recently that contained the following program for a high school football player:     a. Hang Cleans [...] read more