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 that teenage athletes should not be exposed to this type of training.
Firstly, much of the training of coordination takes the form of injury preventative. Any sort of ‘balance’ exercise, for example, requires proprioceptive conditioning and increases in stabilizer recruitment. With ‘synchronization of movement’, large ROM and mobility work is necessary. ‘Kinesthetic differentiation’, by definition, involves sub-maximal efforts or ‘fine-touch’ capacity which is a drastically different stimulus than most young athletes are used to in training settings.