Training young athletes… It seems that everybody dabbles in this market 

Whether the fitness or sport training professional is a Physical Therapist by trade, Personal Trainer to the average adult clientele or Strength Coach to elite sporting stars, when stating their bios and areas or expertise, it seems that the sentence always ends with ‘I am Training Young Athletes, too‘.

And why not, right?

Training young athletes is the fastest growing niche within the entire fitness industry.

It’s worth over $4 billion a year in the United States alone and more than 1 million children, youths and teens hired a Personal Trainer in 2007 – a large number for the purpose of enhancing sport performance.

But that term, ‘enhancing sport performance’ is something that doesn’t really belong in the vernacular of the youth sports training world. At least not in the way we currently use it.

At the risk of sounding acrimonious, let me ask you this question.

How much do you really know about human growth, development and the necessary components of training clients in the pediatric and formative years?

I ask because if I were to start providing hands-on therapy to my clients, render a diagnosis every time I saw an injured athlete or apply what I know to be true about working with pediatric populations to a group of geriatric clients, I would be considered unprofessional and exercising authority well outside my scope of knowledge. And rightfully so.

But why then are young athletes as a demographic group so open to any Trainer or Therapist who decides they want to start taking on this level of client? Performance training for the young athlete is simply not the same as performance training for mature athletes.

For one, training age plays a significant role in determining what sort of exercise stimulus you would program for a given athlete. As does sensitive periods of neurological development and an understanding of the unique overtraining considerations that can be present in the lives of most teenagers.

In fact, performance training as it relates to young athletes should be considered a SECONDARY feature in terms of our goals with respect to programming and session execution.

Secondary because increasing strength, vertical power or speed should and will come as the result of appropriately designed and developmentally-sound skill enhancement work. The concept is simple and the metaphor plain –

Consider the development of a young athlete the same as you would ascending through the progressive ‘grades’ of a contemporary academic system.

You couldn’t pass Grade 2 in six weeks. You couldn’t understand Grade 12 Calculus unless you went through the very basic curriculum of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division found in elementary school.

Everything is progressive and skill enhancing. General knowledge is amassed, progressed and then built on over time.

When intellectually and chronologically appropriate, a young student will begin to immerse themselves in a specific subject matter and initiate the process of specialization.

But this specialization in advanced study cannot take place without the progressive knowledge enhancement and skill acquisition gained along the way.

Now simply put, apply that to the complexity of training young athletes. Speed is a skill. Strength is a skill.

Power generation and absorption are skills. And these skills cannot be gleaned or developed in 6-week programs. It is our earnest pursuit of the training session ‘symptoms’ that are causing the blinders to be up full tilt here.

And what are those symptoms?

• Sweating like a thirsty mule by the end of a training session

• So tired they can barely walk home

• So sore the next day they can’t hardly move

• Feelings of nausea and light-headedness

These are the symptoms we covet. In fact, we base our pride and effectiveness as coaches on being able to create symptoms like these. In their absence, the training session is considered ‘too easy’ and ‘not worth the time’.

How wrong we are.

I will be the first one to tell you that I like a good hard training session. I like to sweat and certainly feel ‘better’ about my own training day efforts when I ‘feel’ as though I accomplished something.

But then, I’m not a teenager in the formative time of life, either. The human organism that we call a ‘teenager’ faces unique challenges that must be factored into the programming and coaching equation.

• They tend not to eat well.

• They don’t sleep much.

• They are riddled with stress about school, academic standing and their futures.

• They are under the care of sporting coaches who, more often than not, run and condition these kids into the ground at the daily practice.

• They end up playing 4 soccer matches every weekend in the summer to accommodate a youth sporting culture that has gone collectively mad.

Throw those realities together and add to the mix that you’re talking about an organism that is still in development from a structural and neural perspective and you’ve got the recipe for absolute disaster from an overtraining, injury and lack of appropriate skill acquisition standpoint.

And then of course, they come to you 3 times a week for 6 weeks for ritualistic floggings in the name of ‘performance enhancement’.

Let me be blunt about this next point –

We need to stop breaking our arms and patting ourselves on the back claiming to have increased ‘Juniors’ vertical jump in ‘Only 6 Weeks’ Adolescent athletes are in such a prime phase of growth and development that biomotor improvements occur quite naturally.

Mother Nature has seen to that.

Testosterone output is high, muscle density and growth is taking place and neural plasticity, although starting to close, has established a base level of coordination that enables proper summation of forces. Teenagers get faster, stronger and more powerful all by themselves.

Our job with this demographic is to help prevent injuries, aid in the development of proper skill execution related to power, force and speed production and add to the training age and knowledge-base of the organism in front of us.
It’s not about making them sweat, vomit, tired or sore now. It’s about making them better over time – just like in school.

Remember this –

ANY Trainer can make an athlete tired.

But not EVERY Trainer knows how to make them better.

Words to live by- and maybe worth a glance in the mirror.

– Brian