I firmly believe that if a child is ready to engage in sport activities, then they are ready to participate in resistance training.
But with that said make sure the kids are mature enough to understand instructions otherwise weight training may not be for them.
In all seriousness, a young athlete will enhance their physical performance and reduce their injury risk if training is programmed properly. Weight training under the supervision of a trained professional is one of the safest things an athlete can do. Risk for injury is extremely low.
Understand that most speed and strength gains in young athletes are due to nervous system development. The nervous system controls everything, so we want to start ingraining good movement patterns, proper athletic motor skills and coordination at a young age. That is why when an athlete is young it is the best time to develop this skill set. But, the issue is that most youth coaches don’t know proper patterns. They don’t know how to coach kids on how to properly run and jump. That's a topic for another day.
A young athlete is like clay and needs to be molded.
I’ll take that one step further though. Think of the young athletes like clay, soft and pliable. But as the athlete ages the clay begins to harden. The clay hardening is the athlete’s patterns becoming more engrained. Whether these patterns are right or wrong they become ingrained. And it’s hard to fix bad patterns.
Take a look at 6 fundamental movements that should be considered when working with young athletes.
Remember this is not an end all be all, but I like to keep things simple, so I feel these six are the most important.
You can start implementing these now.
1.) Running: At it’s most basic, this can be broken down into linear and lateral running. Kids need to learn how to decelerate and accelerate properly. They need to learn how to absorb force and redistribute force. Acceleration, deceleration, and receleration.
2.) Jumping: Break down jumping into vertical, lateral, linear and rotational.
Start with very basic jumping mechanics. How to land and how to jump. Then progress from there.
3.)Throwing/Catching: I love throwing things, and so should you. Reason being is that it's easy to teach/learn and a lot of fun for young athletes to do. Weighted throws (med ball) are an incredibly under utilized tool, but very effective.
But also remember with throwing typically comes catching. So have some tennis balls or small footballs and teach kids how to catch too.
4.) Pushing: To make your life easier I put both upper and lower body movements into pushing. I consider a squat a push. So therefore you have double and single leg push for lower body BUT there is also upper body push. Upper body push can be classified as vertical or horizontal. Including but not limited to, the prowler sled.
5.) Pulling: Pull-ups to deadlifts to inverted rows to climbing trees. Kids don’t do it enough.
It's as simple as that.
6.) Carrying: Kids don’t do manual labor anymore. A lot of us spent our summers working outside doing yard work with our parents or helping our neighbors, and other types of labor. Carrying things like cement bags, buckets of stones, logs and various other things.
Carrying hits everything from the core to the glutes to the upper back to grip, and is also a great bonding experience for you parents out there reading this for your kids.
Notice the lack of glimmer? There wasn't a hidden answer. These all may seem very simple, but incredibly effective. And unfortunately these are things that are disappearing from modern youth coaches.
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