Clean Slate

I wanted to talk all about injuries and how we attempt to control and prevent them with proper training. Many times trainers, including myself, like to advertise that their program is geared toward injury prevention. Many times you will see camps that are strictly for preventing a certain type of injury, say ACL tears.

If I don't put that claim in my flier, does it mean that I do not attempt to prevent injuries in your athletes? OF COURSE NOT!! That would incredibly irresponsible of me to do so.

Instead, what I want and need you to realize is that any good program should prevent injury. This occurs through making sure each athlete has solid movement and good muscle recruitment and coordination. If a player does not have a very clean squat, why the heck am I going to ignore it and say we'll go ahead and squat anyways? If a trainer did that to my child, I would have his head on a plate!!

Instead, realize that many young athletes will not use much more than body weight when they are first working with us. Many don't start working with weights even after a few years!

Why?

Let me give you an artistic example. If I were a painter and I paint a house that is covered in mud, do you think that paint is going to stick? Probably not. The first time I washed the house most of the paint would come off because the house I was painting was not clean.

And this is what happens with athletes and coaches who get too caught up in doing the "fun" stuff of plyometrics and speed work. If the athlete does not have clean movements, any thing a coach tries to teach is just going to be forgotten the first time they go out to play.

You have to un-teach the bad habits so that you're working with a clean slate. Only then will you see the all-star inside shine through the mud.

Sponges and Pruning

How many parents want their young athlete to better than any other player in his or her age group?

Probably a lot of you. When your young athlete outperforms the competition, it is definitely something to be proud about.

However, if you child isn't the all-star on the 11U team, don't worry. THEY'RE 11!!

Don't try to turn your young player into a college athlete right now, because they don't have to be. At Pair & Marotta's Peak Performance Camp we had a pretty wide variety of athletes coming in. Most played baseball, some played soccer and a few played football.

Many played the same sport year round and other played multiple sports throughout the year. And the one thing that myself and Brian both noticed -

The kids who played more than one sport were by a sizeable difference, the better athletes.

Why is this though? Parents dump a lot of money into club teams and making sure that their child is playing the same sport year round. I mean if they want to get better, shouldn't they play more and more?? Not necessarily.

At a young age kids are like sponges, both mentally and physically. This is the time when we should be flooding them with different stimuli to make sure that we are building connections between the movement of their limbs and their brains.

What also happens at this time is a phenomenon called "pruning". You can look at pruning as the "use it or lose it" stage. If a child does not build bridges from their locomotion nerves to their brain, the body will "prune" the connection site because it is not needed based on minimal usage.

After this very sensitive time, if the nerves are not used and the skill is not regarded as important enough to maintain, then it is often very difficult to retrain the skill.

All in all, it is very important to present a wide variety of stimuli to young athletes and to start with very general movements before specific movements. This will ensure that as athletes grow they maintain movements that are needed as the foundation for more sport specific movements that will be refined as they get older.

Be sure to expose your young athlete to a wide variety of movements, sports and games as it will not be detrimental (contrary to popular belief) but only serve to make them better ATHLETES as they mature.