PARENT TIPS AND CONCERNS:
As a parent, I know what it’s like to have the desire to provide your child with the best opportunities to succeed. As a Strength Coach, I know how hard it can be for parents to choose when and with whom to provide your child with sports enhancement training. With hectic practice and game schedules, school work, and the ever increasing number of extra curricular activities kids participate in these days; it’s hard to shuffle it all around while still affording some time for yourself. When you mix in the fact that so many private coaches, trainers, enhancement specialists, and franchised facilities are popping up everyday trying to get your athlete into their program, it can be down right confusing trying to figure out where to go and who to turn to for advice. After all, how many people have you met, who just because they played a sport in high school or college, think that they know how to strength train athletes and provide them with athletic skills that will lead to rapid success?
When can my child begin a strength and conditioning program for his or her sport?
Every child is different but I tend to stick to a guideline of 12 years old for strength training and 10 years old for body awareness training. However, this does not always mean that every child can follow these guidelines. It’s important to assess the child’s development level. I always meet with young children before working with them to assess their ability to maintain attention. I have seen kids as young as 8 years old have great attentiveness to direction and sustain great focus and concentration while performing drills. On the other hand I have seen 12 year old kids who can’t stay focused for more than 3 repetitions of a drill. The child who is more focused and pays more attention will be more likely to see success in sports performance training.
Though upsetting to parents, I’ve turned kids down for training because they just weren’t quite ready to take on these tasks. As hard as it was for those parents to hear that their kid wasn’t ready, I wasn’t about to risk detracting from other athletes’ training and couldn’t take money away from them when the results they wanted weren’t going to be achieved just yet.
Will my child’s performance improve through sports performance training?
Sports performance training can be a very fun and rewarding activity for your child to participate in. It can develop key athletic components that improve the child’s coordination and balance which lead to improved sports performance. Remember that young children react to sports performance training programs differently than older athletes. Young athletes increase their performance abilities through training because of an increased ability to coordinate and control their body. Be aware of individuals and programs that offer large and fast gains in strength, speed and power to young children. Also be wary of those who provide speed and agility programs to very young kids. Often the focus is to teach them a bunch of drills and make them work harder rather than teaching them how to control their body. The more controlled the training environment is, the better chance they have at improving.
Yes strength, speed, and power can improve at a young age, but they did not improve just because they got stronger, can run faster, and can move quicker around some cones. Instead they made these improvements because they learned to control their body better. They’re inexperienced and under challenged neurological pathways have been programmed to run more optimally for success. In fact one of the easiest and effective ways of improving an athletes running speed is simply teaching them how to perform a squatting movement properly. I always have young athletes perform bodyweight squats without a bar, standing on the edge of a platform which forces them to drive through the heels and perform the movement with their hamstrings while stabilizing their core. This is a very controlled and effective way to teach a young athlete to control their body and use their hamstrings, which are very vital to their future success in sport.
With so many programs to choose from, how do I know what kind to sign my child up for?
As a parent, you know your child and his or her strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps you see that your child is slow and lacks strength. You see a program for strength and one for speed. What do you do, sign them up for one or both? Let’s face it, there is a wide variety of programs offered out there today for your child to participate in. They all promise gains in performance and have so many different names to them. They can be straight to the point or elaborately worded.
The best way to answer this programming question is this, when in sport does an athlete rely on only one component of athleticism? An athlete is almost always required to apply multiple athletic skills at one time in order to accomplish a sports skill. They can rely on strength, balance, coordination, speed, and flexibility all at the same time in something as simple as kicking a ball. The best way to improve an athlete’s performance is to turn to a program that develops all components of sport rather than focusing on developing just one. After all, in order to run faster, one must be strong, fast, explosive, coordinated, activate the proper muscles in the right sequence, relax, and stabilize their body; all while trying to move in the intended direction. That becomes a pretty complicated task when you break it down, so why just rely on focusing their training to just speed and agility drills on field when all components can be developed in a well balanced program? If your car isn’t running right, you don’t just look at the tires because they are the only thing in contact with the ground, you look at the engine too and all of it’s components, right?
Should my child be lifting weights or train on machines?
Machine based programs can help to develop work capacity and improve some components of strength in a very controlled environment. However, unless your child is planning on being a Nascar driver, how can they learn to apply force and stabilize their body at the same time?
Think about it, only in Nascar is an individual required to apply force to an outside object while being strapped down to something. All sports, ground based and even those in the water, require athletes to apply or receive a force while stabilizing their body. It’s not often that an athlete can sit down in their sport and let their abs, low back, and legs go completely limp while only performing a movement with their upper body. Even kayakers are required to stabilize and balance their body while paddling, if not, they’d roll over into the water.
That’s why I require all of my athletes, provided they are free of injury, to perform all movements in an unstable environment or against unstable objects. The easiest way to do this is have them use free weight movements with proper supervision while respecting the weight and the movements they perform.
So whom or which facility do I send my child to?
The first step in making this decision is to educate yourself as much as possible while realizing that you are not the expert in performance training. Find out who’s in your area first, visit the facility or coach and observe their training and coaching practices. Watch how they interact with the kids, are they telling them to do things and making them work hard or are they teaching them and providing them with individualized attention? How do they interact with the kids and how do the kids respond to them, is it with respect, reluctance or obedience?
Too often facilities though well recognized are there for one reason, MAKE MONEY! Ask yourself if they really care about the kids and their development and education, or are they there to get as many kids in and out the door as possible to turn a quick buck. I’ve turned down job offers at facilities willing to pay me big bucks just because they knew that my background would attract more clients, yet they wouldn’t allow me to train athletes using my programming knowledge which has gotten me the success I have had with athletes. Instead, they wanted me to use pre-designed “cookie cutter programs” that were not designed for each individual kid.
Besides observing a training session, try to learn more about the background of the individuals there. Are they really knowledgeable about training athletes on an individual basis? Everyone can talk the talk but can they walk it too? Many individuals are quick to give out complicated and well-worded advice, but don’t fully understand how to apply it. Anyone can learn 5,000 different exercises that look cool, but I’d rather see someone who knows only 50 and can effectively incorporate them into a program that gets results. Do the drills relate to one another, do they transfer to one another and set the athlete up for success or are they being done just because it’s harder or it’s something different that they haven’t done before or in awhile? In order for an athlete to improve, interactive crossover and reinforcement must be obtained.
That’s why it is important for you to feel comfortable with the coaches that will be working with you child. Are they there because they were a successful athlete and played sports, are they regurgitating someone else’s knowledge, or can they think for themselves? Some of the best coaches I have had the pleasure of working with, weren’t outstanding athletes or even played sports, but they had a great understanding of the mechanics of movement, the interactions of different movement patterns, how to perform them, and what results they can get with them.
NTS-AD located in Stevens Point and Plover, Wisconsin.
Email us today at: info@nts-ad.com or call 715-252-9926