Kids Fitness
I’ve just released a very special video of one of my favorite presenters in the world of sport and kids fitness training, Lee Taft.
It’s from the 2010 IYCA International Summit, where Lee started off his presentation by playing Simon Says for kids fitness with the entire audience – all 300 of us!!
But it wasn’t all fun and games as he made some incredibly valid points before he took us through the game:
1) Connect from Minute 1…
Activities like is are and ideal way to begin a training session. They get young athletes thinking and tuned into you right from the very start.
This is a misunderstood and underappreciated role in the coaching world. How quickly you can get your young athletes tuned into you is critical with respect to compliance and adherence throughout your training day.
2) Communication Needs per Young Athletes…
It allows you to gage a ‘Personality Test’ on your young athletes. As I have mentioned many times, young athletes are a combination of ‘Skill versus Motivation’ in terms of their temperaments.
By watching which young athletes in your group slip away to the back of the crowd and play Simon Says shyly and on their own, they’re providing you with a virtual roadmap for how your communication style to them must be.
3) Coordination, Strength & Reactivity…
Some of the most important aspects of working with young athletes, very often get lost in the world of exercise selection and “sets and reps”
Coordination, for example, (a physical skill that consists of 11 separate bodily awarenesses) is often ignored completely by Coaches who don’t appreciate the need to train more than just basic elements of strength, flexibility and cardio with young athletes.
Simon Says provides the perfect drop-back to work on the more subtle but incredibly important training systems such as balance (single leg movements), reactivity (altering your cueing speed) and static strength (requiring positions of held, static contractions).
Lee is 100% accurate when he says that games like Simon Says are invaluable to Coaches who want to have better communication with their young athletes and prepare them much more keenly for success in sports.
‘Til next time
Brian
P.S. After you watch the video be sure to check out how you can get the entire collection of the 2010 IYCA International Summit DVD’s for FREE. Click the link below to see what I mean:
This was great! I had so much fun doing that Lee.
Also, let’s not forget that for younger children, between (roughly) age 4 – 10 is a long critical period (with different substages) for learning the concept of rules and rule following.
Rule based play is important for learning to follow rules. sometimes that seems contradictory, but it isn’t. The more I play with a concept, the more intimately i know it and understand it.