As the title suggests, the vast majority of my training in with youth athletes, as such the learning style and method to teach has to be totally different when compared to a more professional athlete. These are the biggest things I've learnt so far.
1) Go Easy on Theory
Kids really couldn't care less about the shin angle during your take off and transition to maximum velocity, kids don't care why I want them to jump high. Just because I find the reasons I program in certain activities interesting, doesn't mean kids do. If they ask why, I certainly tell them. But for the most part, I just say "I promise doing this will have you smashing your competition" and thats enough for them.
2) Teach the drills, but don't expect perfection.
With runners, there are a number of tried and tested drills that everyone from Billy Bob down to street, to Usain Bolt uses to maintain correct form. With my kids, every session we do the drills, I reteach those that forgot but I don't expect perfection. We run through them 2 or 3 times, then move on. I will also concentrate on only 1 section of the drill to cue them on each session. This week I was emphasising the hip lock on the A Drills, next week i won't mention the hip lock but I'll concentrate on ankle flex. Keeping it simple. Once the kids progress, they will get it eventually, but for now I don't want them to hate the drills.
**3) You must be flexible. **
The session last night I had planned on doing more finishing techniques, but as we ran through the different parts I was getting questions on stride length on the take off. Thats perfect, the kids showed interest so the last thing I'm going to do is brush over that. We ditched everything else and just worked on starts and building speed out of the blocks. They were engaged the entire time.
4) Keep it fun.
The last point here is you have to keep it fun and challenging. I don't mean have them run until they puke. But once we've covered everything we need to, lets reinforce what we've learnt with some more challenging games. For example on the beach on sunday we had an awesome headwind. So I pulled out the parachutes and had the girls sprinting into the wind. They were being pulled all over the place, they were wrecked after it, but the smiles on their faces were huge and they asked if they can do it again next week. The last thing you ever want when working with youth is for them to leave bored. Being wrecked and can hardly walk is perfectly fine, but they have to leave happy.
I hope you're found this interesting, if you're interested feel free to follow me on Instagram @invictus_strength_coach
Dude. Great to see you posting again :)
Aussies also hang out here now - https://discord.gg/h8CrK2d4 -
Thanks mate, still useless with posting regularly, but I'm going to try.
I'll check out the new discord, I'm so far out of the loop these days.
Have you ever had to deal with that tiny subset of parents that seem to think that all training requires is just doing the thing more and harder and absolutely will not under any circumstances be told why drills are important and are grumpy about their kids "sitting around doing nothing" (even when they are actually doing the drills) because they're not doing the thing?
Did that make any sense whatsoever? XD
Hey mate, great to hear from you :)
I haven't had that exact situation, but I have had a few parents get their back up and being told their child could benefit from training and they tell me how naturally talented they are. I'm sorry luv, but little Billy will only get so far on natural talent when the kid down the road who may be slower than him today has been putting in the work for a year and at the next meet absolutely smokes your naturally talented but bone lazy kid.
I remember trying to explain that concept to my eldest. Natural talent is great and hard workers get far even without natural talent. So imagine how far you get if you combine the two.
As they get older, the naturally talented who don't want to work always seem to end up leaving the sport when the hard workers who never used to be able to touch them start surpassing them.
100% true. The naturally talented also get hurt much more often than those that work hard.
Hm I wonder if it's just a gym thing then XD
Do they think all those naturally talented athletes don't train at all? o_O
A dance thing too, I think.
When 14yo was doing acro pretty much everything they were doing was very obviously related. Do other dance styles have drills that don't look like dance?
Not really. You still got the complaining parents trying to convince the teachers that their kid was the better choice for the role, etc, when they were overlooked because they didn't focus in class, while other "less talented" kids did, or didn't get to move onto more advanced things.
Fun times x_x
Hello. Good to see you posting again!
Cheers mate. Hopefully I can get more regular. Having to do a full 8hrs work is so much less fun than my previous 1hr a day lol