Conditioning is one of the key components when looking to improve your fitness level, whether you are an adult or a kid, but how you go about conditioning would be different when applying it to the youth population as well as any program design for kids. One of the mistakes I see being made is treating kids like they are “little adults” when it comes to training them or thinking since they are in high school, that they be trained like elite athletes.
Yes, there will always be one or two that have a high skill level, but how many of our young athletes go on to compete at the professional level. When I was growing up, we didn’t have any certified strength and conditioning specialists, especially at the youth level. When I got to high school, we were thrown in the weight room, and asked to bench, squat and dead-lift as much as we could. We were never taught, proper lifting technique, how to prepare the body to lift or even how to properly warm up our bodies before any type of physical exertion. Many coaches still believe in taking systems from colleges or even the pros and training the young athletes like professionals and many high schools still do not even have trained strength coaches over seeing the male and female athletes in the weight room. If we are asking our athletes to perform technical lifts with external loads, don’t you think it is important that they master the technique first unloaded, then progress to lighter loads and master each sequence before they are allowed to progress? Many kids are not even being taught how to handle there own body weight, and being asked to perform demanding drills and lifts at a high intense volumes and loads that will cause injuries either immediately or down the road.
Now with all the science and applications behind the development of young athletes, it’s important that our kids are getting the proper training in a safe environment, that we as coaches and trainers expose young athletes to as many fundamental movement skills as possible to build better all around athletes. It is so important that are young athletes/participants are taught the foundational steps of movement acquisition when it comes to speed and strength to ensure that they are set up for future success.
Kids face many challenges in life when growing up; improper training when it comes to athletics, especially in this day in age should not be one of them. Sports and exercise with our young should be viewed as a vehicle that promotes leadership and fair play. By creating and implementing developmentally and individually appropriate athletic based stimulus into the lives of our youth, we will see a change in their long term sporting success and adherence to the love of sport for a lifetime. "To become truly great, one has to stand with people, not above them."- Charles de Montesquieu
If any of you have kids playing sports, make sure they are getting the proper coaching and training from qualifed people, and that they are looking out for them with regards to safety and proper programing. I will have a lot more to say in the near future.
Best-
Anthony
