Archive for “Mature Athletes” Tag

Youth Sports Training Technique: Part 2

Posted on: February 16th, 2011 by IYCA 1 Comment

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Group One, Group Two & Group Three youth sports training classifications… But what else?

Here’s Part 2:

How efficiently an athlete learns the technical skills of a sport, strength training exercise or movement is determined by several variables –

Age – Complex skills are often understood and comprehended better by more mature athletes (although individual exceptions certainly apply).

Emotional State – Relaxed and easy-going athletes tend to learn and reproduce new skills better than athletes who are uptight and self-critical.

Motivation (more…)

Symptomatology of Training Young Athletes

Posted on: January 27th, 2011 by IYCA 5 Comments

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?

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Fitness Programs For Kids: Top 3 Keys To Speed Training

Posted on: October 7th, 2009 by IYCA No Comments

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Fitness Programs For Kids

Fitness Programs For Kids speed training for young athletes
International superstar Speed Coach Lee Taft and I agree on almost everything related to training athletes.

Together, we have found through our combined 40 years of experience that these are the 3 most important factors to a successful speed training program –

Speed Key #1 – Create a Developmental System
Training for speed has to be developmental in nature.

With younger athletes (6 – 9 years old) training for speed is a matter of allowing kids to explore various aspects of movement from a self-learning perspective.

As a Coach or Trainer, your objective is to create games and drills that provide a broad-base of multi-directional movement (i.e. forward, backwards) as well as timing-oriented skills (i.e. skipping to a specific cadence).

It is important to resist the urge to ‘over-teach’ or ‘make perfect’ the way your youngsters are performing these skills.

Young nervous systems must be given the opportunity to learn through a trial and error process, what quality movement feels like.

With athletes 10 – 18, your training efforts can become much more teaching based and focus will shift to perfection of movement habits and eventually ‘drilling’ (i.e. repetitive sets of specific skills).

Do not be fooled into thinking that young athletes and more mature athletes can learn the skills associated with speed & agility in the same way, however.

A developmental system is necessary for optimal speed & agility training.

Our new Youth Speed & Agility Specialist Certification contains the complete developmental process that Lee and I have used successfully for nearly 4 decades.

—> Click here for an example of that system

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