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Health & Fitness

Developing Better, Healthier Young Athletes

A blueprint for turning our kids into better athletes and enhancing lifelong fitness.

Emerging research in exercise physiology in children helps us answer the question of how to help our kids develop into great athletes. The research shows that there are different stages when children are more apt to improve different aspects of athleticism such as speed, agility or strength. For instance, the first window of opportunity for improving speed happens at 6-8 years of age in girls and 7-9 in boys, whereas motor skill development is optimal from 9-12, and strength development is accelerated when the adolescent growth spurt begins to slow. The Long Term Athlete Develop Model (LTAD) instructs us on these windows of opportunity and encourages us to develop overall physical literacy in our younger athletes, and not specialize into particular sports until high school.

Unfortunately, youth sports are a poor vehicle for overall athletic development. As coaches in youth sports, we have one to two hours per week to teach complex, position-specific skills, rules and strategies to grade school kids. Not only is there limited time to develop well rounded physical literacy, that isn't an expectation. Instead, we are expected to teach them how to hit a home run and make the all-star team.

Developing more versatile athletes would only take doing a few conditioning exercises and drills from other sports, but on a regular basis and across all sports. For instance, for a few minutes during softball practice the team might play kickball, run an agility obstacle course and learn how to do a forward lunge. Later in the year at soccer practice they might learn a jump shot, do bear crawls and learn the downward dog. In the short term, taking time out of their practices to cross train might delay position specific skills needed immediately, but specific skills can be picked up much easier later if there is a good base of neuromuscular control, balance and coordination. The LTAD is, as it says, a long-term model. It states that if we give our athletes a well rounded youth experience they will flourish at the varsity and college levels, often at sports they are trying for the first time.

The LTAD model is not only designed for optimal performance, but also for injury prevention and long term health. As a personal trainer, I see some of these athletes in the gym as middle schoolers and high schoolers. For most of them I need to start with the basics of how to activate core muscles to keep the spine in neutral position, how to activate leg muscles properly to stabilize the knee, or how to stand up straight. We find that the more athletes practice balance and stabilization exercises, the less they experience knee or other injuries on the field. A bigger concern is the kids I don’t see because they have been turned off by rigorous youth sports programs.

Canadian Sport for Life and other programs have adopted the LTAD model as a blueprint for national sports programs and we could do the same in our community. With buy-in from the major local sports leagues, our youth coaches could be trained in exercises that teach the core competencies we need our kids to learn. A cross-training program of 15 minutes could successfully be incorporated into every practice in every sport in Mill Valley. Let me know if you think this is a good idea.

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