500 Words a Week - Youth Development
I’ve briefly discussed before about how we can view the training process as a road trip, we can also apply this to youth development. We have an overarching plan created, with an end goal in mind and various stops along the way. However, we are flexible and able to adapt due to circumstances that might occur along the trip. This is especially important due to the individualised nature of growth and maturation.
Building that overarching plan has to be more detailed than just several lists of exercise progressions. We can use several models that have been published to help us create our road trip.
A great place to start is Lloyd and Oliver’s Youth Physical Development model, shown above. What I like about this model is that it states how every physical quality should receive some form of stimulus throughout our athlete’s progression into adulthood, just how much and how we impart that stimulus changes significantly depending on ages. It also highlights that the most effective training modes are those that complement the already occurring physiological adaptations in our athletes as a result of growth and maturation. For example, once our athletes enter their post peak height velocity stage, they enter their peak weight velocity stage. During this phase there is a large increase in androgen hormones, we can complement these hormone increases by performing extra hypertrophy work in our athletes to make the most of the already present physiological adaptations occurring.
Another paper I would encourage you to check out is Pichardo’s paper, where he integrates many youth development models. Examples of which are shown below.
A great point that was brought to my attention by two coaches in my new role is that we have to really maximize the time our athletes are with us from a development perspective. Our athletes have so much they need to learn from a sporting perspective. We can’t be consistently and always reducing the minutes they spend on field. Also, when you think about the fact that some of these athletes might have in total a travel time of 2+ hours, we need to ensure we are providing our athletes every chance we can to maximise on pitch time.
I’m currently working through the Speedworks Virtual Internship which has been fantastic. I recently watched a lecture from Tom Farrow on developing speed and agility in team sports which brought up some amazing points. Our job as performance coaches is to help athletes realise their true potential, and expose them to situations that force them to rehearse and reproduce certain key movements. So that when they are on-field, they have the confidence in their ability to perform these key actions. On the pitch, our athletes will only see what they perceive they can do. Hence if our athletes can’t make sharp changes of direction, their vision on what they can do on the pitch narrows significantly. Enabling confidence in our athlete’s ability to take these sharp changes of direction, expands the options they can perform on-field. As practitioners, we know that certain on-field movements such as the change of direction example above are underpinned by certain physical qualities such as linear speed, strength and power, further highlighting that how everything we do is aimed at helping our athletes realise their on-field potential.
