Personal training, or more specifically strength & conditioning, for children is not about keeping them busy. It's about teaching critical skills that improve performance and more importantly, prevent injury.
Every program should have:
1. Great coaching 2. provide a good assessment before the program begins.
Skills every program should teach are:
3.Pelvic Tilt
4.Hip Hinge
5.Deceleration/Landing
6.Posterior Chain training/awareness
7.Jumping/Running form
8.Jumping rope/hopping
9.Crawling/Tumbling
As parents, it's almost impossible to know what your child should be doing in their training to improve performance and prevent injury. Most parents are happy when their child's training has met two qualifications: 1. They worked hard and/or are tired 2. they had fun. Although I agree that a child should enjoy their training, I think that being tired is an awful judge of what kind of workout your child is getting. Some of the most important skills that we teach involve drills that do not make the children tired at all. I love analogies and examples and the example I always use for this is: If you offered a bum on the street $50 to make your child tired, I guarantee he would run your kid around and get them exhausted to earn that $50. The question you have to ask is: do you want a bum training your kid? Of coarse not, no one would, but if you judge your child's training based on your child being tired then any bum can meet that qualification. It takes experience, vast knowledge, research and a great strength coach to be able to actually make your child improve their performance and prevent injury. Above I gave the list of skills your child should be learning/doing if you want them to improve performance and reduce injury and below I will elaborate on these skills. I don't care if your child trains with us or somewhere else, but what I do care about is that your child is learning these skills so that they are not wasting their time and opening themselves up to injury. Most kids from other facilities, or kids that aren't training, start training at The Spot and cannot perform these basic athletic movements and/or come to us with needless injuries. The purpose of this blog is to educate parents so this stops. If the training your child is receiving does not include all of the below elements then please take them to another facility or you will regret it later on. If your child is not training then take them somewhere that ensures they learn all of the below skills. Do I think that our strength & conditioning program is the best, yes, but as long as the below skills are being met then you are taking your child to a quality facility and they will be better for it. This is not an all-inclusive list but it is somewhere to start so that you know if your child is receiving quality training. The first two are requirement for any quality program but the last 7 are skills that must be taught in that program.
1. Learning, not babysitting - The most important thing on this list is: IS YOUR CHILD BEING TAUGHT PROPER PATTERNS? We coach every rep our athletes do. On top of that, we make our athletes coach each other, every rep, so that they are learning as they are teaching.. If your child is just running through drills or cones, over and over again, or doing exercises with little to no supervision, then they are not learning. Simply throwing some cones and ladders out and having kids run around is just babysitting, not learning. If the athletes aren't being taught proper patterns then they are learning bad patterns and these patterns lead to injury. So even if they include drills/exercises to work the below skills, if they aren't coaching the kids up properly, then it doesn't matter.
2. Assessment - If you take your child somewhere and they just throw them in with a bunch of other kids, without first doing an assessment, then you are wasting your money and your child's time. The assessment sets the base for the whole training program and it gives you a measurable way to track progress. With our semi-private athletes we do an extensive assessment that gives a very tailored program for the athlete. Even with our large team training we still do a more basic assessment so we can direct training for the team as a whole.
3. Pelvic Tilt - If an athlete does not possess pelvic tilt control then their control over their body will be very limited. On top of that they will lose out on precious speed and jumping ability.
4. Hip Hinge - The most basic of all athletic movements is the hip hinge. From the golf swing to tackling in football, if you can't hip hinge, then you can't play at a high level. If your child can't touch their toes, 99% of the time it's not a flexibility issue, it's that they don't know how to properly hip hinge.
5. Deceleration/Landing - Most injuries in sport happen during deceleration. This is usually expressed as a torn ACL in landing jumps or in slowing down to change direction. If proper body positions are not taught for these activities then you are playing with fire and asking for an injury, especially for female athletes.
6. Posterior Chain training/awareness - The muscles of the back of the body are what makes an athlete good. Strong hamstrings, glutes, and lower backs are what professional athletes have that make them special. Ignoring this area is asking for less performance and more injuries. I put this before jumping/running form because although form is very important and will make big changes in the novice or poor athlete, it will only take you so far. An athlete must strength train to get faster and jump higher and that strength training must be focused on the posterior chain. Many facilities don't do strength training with young athletes and just have them repetitively jump or run, calling it "speed" or "jump" training. Some even add bands to make it seem like they are doing something. Bands alone are not strength training and without the strength training component the program is doing something - wasting your athlete's time. If just running and jumping made athletes faster or jump higher then all they would ever have to do is play their perspective sports and they would keep getting better. We all know this isn't true, yet parents keep taking athletes to these "speed" and "jumping" places that provide no real strength training component.
7. Jumping/Running form - Speed ladders do not make you faster! No sport moves your feet in tiny little patterns. Coaching jumping/running form and doing form jump/running drills should not just be an afterthought of an athletes program but a cornerstone of the young athletes program. If jumping/running drills are not taught and coached then your child will not be able to maximize their potential speed or vertical. Simply telling athlete to do a drill is like giving a kid a math book and not teaching them anything. Having information is different then learning information and thats where a good strength coach comes in.
8. Jumping rope/hopping - Speed ladders don't give athletes better footwork but jumping rope does. Jumping rope is a lost art, but not at The Spot. It is a critical part of any of our young athletes programs. Jumping rope involves hopping(two feet jump,two feet land,which is a basic skill that must be mastered) hand eye coordination, timing, body awareness, joint durability and conditioning(once they can do it without messing up).
9. Crawling/Tumbling - Body awareness or proprioception(if you like big words) is one of the biggest things being lost with the specialization at such young ages with athletes. When I was a kid I might play 3 different sports in one day but now kids are only doing one sport year round. This gives them very limited motor pattern exposure and limits their overall athleticism and body awareness. Crawling/Tumbling are two of the best ways to fix this problem. My 2yr old daughter can do a better front roll then a few of the Division I athletes I've worked with for the first time. These athletes also, not surprisingly, have had an issue with injuries due to poor body awareness. We incorporate special crawling/tumbling exercises, that we coach well, to illicit great body awareness changes in our young athletes.
An athletes window to play college or professional sports is very small. If they waste their time training at a facility that is not teaching them these skills, that are essential for athletic success, then they are risking injury, not getting a scholarship or potentially being cut from a professional team. We want to see every athlete reach their fullest potential and that is why we view our young athletes as the most important part of The Spot Athletics. We know that we have the chance to effect what happens the rest of their life and this is not a responsibility we take lightly.
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