Archive for “Proper Execution” Tag

The X’s and O’s of Training Young Athletes

Posted on: June 23rd, 2010 by IYCA 2 Comments

Training Young Athletes

What a young organism needs to experience in the way of physical stimulus can largely be deduced by chronological age. Certainly biological age (relative body maturation), emotional age (psychological maturation) and even personality (temperament) can all be factored into the equation, but I have found in my 13 year career that chronological age determents can be successfully applied in 90% of the cases – the remaining 10% can be accounted for through proper coaching and identification.

Having said all that, the following is a brief rundown of the physical needs of ‘kids’ based on chronological age:

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Prevent Overtraining for Young Athletes

Posted on: September 3rd, 2009 by IYCA 13 Comments

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Young Athletes Programming

In far too many situations throughout North America, strength coaches and personal trainers make common errors in their programming for young athletes, many of which can lead to overtraining syndromes –

Critical Analysis of Biomotor Ability

In working with young athletes, there is very little reason to ever ‘test’ their ability at certain lifts or speed variances. Your programming guidelines must be based around instilling proper execution of technique in your young athletes from a lift and movement economy standpoint. Having said that, gleaning 1, 3, 5 or 8 RM values on any particular exercise should be deemed a distant secondary consideration to teaching the proper values of form and function.

By using a ‘Teaching Model’ of exercise development rather than a ‘Training Model’ you are taking the pressure off of kids to reach for biomotor improvements at the expense of developing sound technique.

Changing Exercises to Often

Although when training adult clientele, there are neural advantages to altering your exercise selection often, with young athletes the reality is that the initial stages of training should comprise little more than dedicated time to teach and become proficient in the basics of lift and movement economy.

Far too often, trainers work to make young athlete routines challenging and neurally stimulating by incorporating complex programming and exercise selection into the mix early in the athletes’ training life. Resist the urge to make a neurological impact and instead, focus your efforts on developing sound competency in just a few basic lifts – the foundation you build during this time is paramount to eventually increasing both the volume and intricacy of your programming.

Consider the Athlete’s Entire Life

When creating a training program for a young athlete, you must take into consideration their entire life – that is, don’t just make training sessions hard for the sake of making them hard.

You do a disservice to the athlete and your business by following this practice.

For instance, if the young athlete is in-season for a particular sport, there practice and game schedule must be considered into the reality of your overall programming. Soccer practices, for instance four days per week coupled with one to two games per week, will leave any young athlete bordering on the verge of overtraining syndrome as it is. Your job during times like this is to augment them with restorative training that does not serve to push them lower beneath what would be considered normal and healthy biological levels.

Additionally, you must work to understand your young athletes’ eating and sleeping habits as well. Inappropriate nutrition and poor sleeping patterns (which many teenagers face today) are precursors to overtraining syndrome in that they are two of the more important restorative elements trainees can use to combat such concerns.

As a professional trainer working with young athletes, you are responsible and must assume accountability for their overall health and wellbeing. When training young athletes and in an effort to ensure quality, efficacy-based training practices, resist the temptation to do the ‘norm’ by making exercise sessions hard and physically challenging. Instead, follow the three key points above to ensure optimal training conditions and guard against the very real concerns of overtraining.

– Brian

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Young Athletes Power Training Myth?

Posted on: June 29th, 2009 by IYCA 4 Comments

Young Athletes and Plyometrics

Almost without exception, every ‘sport-performance training center’ and youth sporting association in North America both markets and incorporates some degree of plyometric conditioning into the routines of the athletes they manage. More often than not, the trainer or coach prescribes an unintelligible series of jumping exercises and can be seen either holding a clipboard and a stop watch as they count and record the number of jumps or foot contacts a young athlete makes within a certain period of time, or barking out commands to the young athletes ‘jump higher’. Plyometric training has become such a ‘catch-phrase’ in the vernacular of trainers and coaches that it is often marketed as a sole measure of distinction for a training facility or individual coach/trainer. Do you know how many sporting clubs, for instance, have told me that they would love to have their young athletes train at my facility, but their Director of Coaching has a ‘plyometric class’ that he/she hosts every week and that’s all the conditioning they need?

Plyometric training has become watered down in North America to such a level that now even basic health clubs have introduced ‘plyometric jumps’ into their general group exercise classes as a means of achieving some measure of ‘high intensity’ training. Jumping and then abruptly stopping and holding a fixed position, jumping and then jumping again after a cursory pause or being taken through a series of jumping exercises without being taught proper execution of either the jumping or landing phases respectively are simply gross misappropriations of what plyometric training is or how it should be applied.

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120 Young Athletes… 45 Minutes

Posted on: June 9th, 2008 by IYCA 7 Comments

Young Athletes Can be Coached In Big Groups

Now this is the kind of situation that baffles many coaches and
trainers.

But for good reason.

What do you do when your job is to effectively train 120 young
athletes, are only given 45 minutes and have nothing but an open
gym space?

It’s actually quite simple.

Here’s the rundown step-by-step:

1. Assess Your Athletes

Your assessment is not based on any sort of biomotor testing or
functional movement. It can’t be.

I was given very little warning about this contract and simply
don’t have the time or ability to perform any type of real
evaluation.

The assessment I’m referring to is based on knowledge
gathering in order to ascertain the ‘likelihoods’ of the
situation.

What many of the ‘assessment crazy’ professionals in our industry
don’t seem to understand about working with young athletes
is that you can evaluate and program for what I call the
‘likely’s’

120 young football players aged 15 – 17. It is likely that:

a. They are used to pounding weight in the gym so don’t have
much in the way of solid form with respect to lift mechanics.

b. Due to growth and other extraneous factors, they are tight
through the hip complex and weak in the posterior chain.

c. They don’t typical work on mobility, active flexibility or
concentrated torso strength.

d. Their movement mechanics have probably never even been
addressed.

In the absence of being able to truly assess, my ability to
program for these kids is based on the ‘likely factors’ of what
I know to be true.

2. Space versus Time

My objective here is simple.

Create a program that focuses on the following system –

a. Teach Effectively

b. Monitor Adherence

c. Keep the young athletes Moving

If I can’t teach proper execution, I may as well pack up and go
home.

If I can’t monitor to make sure execution is correct, I am doing
more harm than good.

If I don’t keep these kids moving, engaged and thinking relative
to the space I have them in, I should just let them have at it in
the weight room on there own.

The key is to factor all of these unique issues into your
program.

Creating effective training programs has as much to do
with intangible aspects of session flow as it does with the
exercise selection itself.

Here’s what I came up with given the above scenarios.

It’s a three tiered program that alters focus as the session
moves on –

SECTION ONE

Hip Circuits (hip complex)
Bridges (glute activation)
Elbows/Up (torso activation)

SECTION TWO

Hip/Hamstring Deep Stretch (hip mobility)
Lateral Squats (adductor mobility)
Split Squats (posterior chain activation + hip complex)
Ankle Mobility

SECTION THREE

Deceleration Technique (movement aptitude)
Bear Crawl (system strength)
Crab Walk (systemic strength)

120 young athletes.

45 minutes.

No equipment.

No evaluation.

No problem.

I’ll be hitting you with some video of these young athletes training sessions
later this week so you can see what it all looks like.

‘Till next time,

Brian