Young Athletes Need to Know This to Maximize Their Potential...(You Won't Hear it From Coaches!!)

Age Appropriate Performance Training to Help Young athletes Improve Athleticism That You Can Perform anywhere!!
We started talking a little bit about younger athletes, and about age appropriate training. We've got coaches watching that are high school coaches, youth coaches, and older coaches that watch the channel, talking about age appropriate stuff thatt coaches should be thinking about.
We've heard for years, wives tales, lifting weights is gonna stop growth, and it doesn't do that. But there's certainly age appropriate training. We want to think of it more than weightlifting, we want to think of it as training. And I think that's the term you use probably rather than weightlifting. When somebody's early on, let's say they're 10 years old, they want movement mastery. Do they know how to march? Do they swing their opposite arm and leg correctly, when they're marching? Can they do walking lunges? Can they control their body in space? Do they just understand general movements?
We teach cross-crawl movement patterns so that we get them prepared for later on to get stronger.
When we look at an age break, and really the answer is pre pubescent, you know pre pubescent is just movement, mastery, movement literacy, think of it like we're teaching them the ABCs right now, so that at some point, they can read and then at some point, they can write their own book. But if they don't know the ABCs, it's very difficult to read and then to write. The same thing is true, if somebody doesn't know how to march and skip, and hop and jump, and single leg hop, and single leg, jump and move laterally, efficiently, then it becomes very difficult to be a very good athlete. Now, you and I may have learned those things in creative free-play. And there's a lot of discussion about creative free play these days.
Creative free play is when you go out and you were out until the streetlights came on, and you came home. And that's just part of the thing. You played whatever game in your neighborhood that you played with the neighborhood kids. And that candidly just doesn't happen that much anymore. Now, you've got a cone set up here and a flag there. And aren't learning reactive types of athleticism. If you jumped out of a tree or maybe off of a building, or maybe you were running from something or someone one, you learned how to sprint and burst and change directions. But when you jump out of a tree, and you land incorrectly, very quickly, that stinger that goes from toe to head, you learn Oh, I better bend my knees and get into more of a an athletic position. It happens naturally. Those are, concepts that we are teaching now that kids got naturally before.
When I was coaching at the NFL level, we were teaching our rookies, how to get into and own the athletic position, the landing position to on a jump. And I was sort of like, man, why are we having to do this? It's because we've made everything so structured, that kids don't figure it out on their own. Like there's some figuring out that you play basketball, you figure out how to jump and land. If you play, in the backyard jumping out of your treehouse or your tree or whatever you learn how to land, learn how to move. If you're playing tag, the reaction skills developed, have you cut left, I have to chase you to catch you. Then the leadership skills that are developed, we pick teams, somebody needs to pick the game that we're going to play somebody that needs to set the rules that are going to be made. And so we're working on those things, and I think in training, we have to consider the kids these days aren't getting those developmental parts.
So in a young athlete, pre pubescent training process, making it fun, making it reactive, making it creative. There are going to be some really critical components to helping their long term development.
When we got scared and we protected our children or we specialized where club sports became such a huge money business that people we're capitalizing on it. And then parents really feel the pressure of, oh, man, I've got to specialize or I'll get behind.
Ethan and all the other coaches on www.eliteathle... have programming on our site. We have ebooks, I have one on passing mechanics, Michelle Granger has a couple on fastpitch softball pitching. Ethan has full workout programs being built as we speak. And so we'll have them up with full workout blocks to work with kids, you can slow cook em' with really high quality training. If you guys have topics that you are interested in, in terms of sports, training, sports, performance training, human performance training, obviously, Ethan's the guy.

[@apthelabel271]

Love your channel man

[@EliteAthletesTV]

Thanks!

[@footballsamurai]

I hope that this presentation reaches a wide audience. I think that this info is a must for; educators, coaches, parents and the athletes themselves. PLAY (sometimes with some structure) is essential for young persons to learn about their bodies and how to move about in their environment. Kids (people) also learn faster when they are having FUN. I have been teaching/coaching athletes and martial artists since my CAL days ('75) and adding a play element has always been a part of the pedagogy. This presentation is excellent, thank you.

[@EliteAthletesTV]

Thanks Mark. Sorry for the delayed response. Coming off a recent surgery.