In this episode of the Fitness Edda, Coach Erik gives a high level overview of the problems we see with most Youth Training Programs. Specifically, those designed to prepare athletes for their upcoming seasons. The transcript is below.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:26 Strength Training for Youth is NOT a Problem
01:54 Lack of Fundamentals
03:57 Overuse and Over-specialization
05:18 Youth Training: Goals and Misinterpretations
06:37 The Fix

Transcript:
What’s going on everyone? Coach Erik here with Viking Athletics. We are back with another installment of the Fitness Edda. This should hopefully be a quick topic. Today we’re going to be talking about the common problems that we see with youth training programs, what they are, and how to fix them.

Before we dive in, what is not a problem? Youth athletes lifting weights. We frequently see this thrown around. I hope most people realize that it’s been thoroughly debunked at this point, but for a long time was an idea that youth athletes lifting weights would cause them to stunt their growth. You were in danger of damaging growth plates, and I don’t have the actual study that was reviewed that led to this conclusion.

So, I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially the study was looking at child laborers who were in mining camps, and the conclusion was that the lifting of heavy rocks is what stunted their growth. It did very little to address the fact that they were also malnourished and in terrible condition. We have long since discovered that those were the actual causes of stunted growth, and not the actual physical labor that they were doing.

There are numerous studies out there that highlight the benefits of youth athletes lifting weights, both from a physical perspective and the mental focus and the boost in academics that they get from being physically active. So that is not a problem because it is something we encourage. That’s why we have a youth program.

To get into the issues with training programs that we see for youth, we need to understand the most common issues that we see with youth sports. Number one is a lack of movement foundation. We often throw kids into these sports. They are learning sport specific skills, kicking, throwing, manipulating a stick, whether that’s a baseball bat, tennis racket, hockey stick, lacrosse stick, etc. Without first building their fundamentals in how to run and jump. It is amazing how many kids when they jump off of a box have not been taught how to properly land and they end up hurting themselves because they never learned how to dissipate force through their lower limbs.

Same thing goes with running. A little bit of work on gait goes a long way. I’m sure we’ve all seen kids that when they start running they just look plain awkward. A little work goes a long way to mitigating that. We throw them into sports that require running and jumping without those fundamentals. So that is a big issue.

And frankly, that’s not for a youth training program to address. I would argue that this should be addressed in gym class, and a gym class would be better spent teaching children the foundations and foundational movement patterns rather than playing games and learning the specific rules of different games. Or at least it should be done in conjunction. Obviously, we want gym class to be fun to encourage physical activity. There needs to be some kind of balance. I will leave it to the educators to determine at what stage that should be introduced, whether that’s in preschool, elementary school, or a little bit later. I’m not an expert on that, just my two cents.

The biggest issue that we see with youth sports is overuse. What does that mean? Children specializing in a sport very early on. They decide I’m not gonna play multiple sports. I’m going to be a soccer player. And that is all they do. Whether that means they have one long season or they’re playing in three different soccer leagues throughout the year, they don’t really have an off season. They are playing soccer all year long.

Most injuries occur due to overuse of the same tissues without giving them a break, without giving them a chance to recover. This is true regardless of age. When we are young, we tolerate overuse a lot better than when we are older. So, children can get away with it until they can’t. And we see torn ACLs in soccer and basketball. We see rotator cuff surgery and Tommy John surgery required in baseball. Overuse of these tissues leads to injuries.

It also leads to burnout. Children that get mentally burned out with the sports that they’re supposedly specializing in, and they don’t want to play. So, a little variety goes a long way for a number of different reasons.

So, if we understand that overuse is the biggest issue that we see with training programs, what we do in the off-season , most coaches recognize, correctly, that their goal for the training program is to prepare athletes for the sport. Their mistaken interpretation is they try to mimic the exact demands of that sport in the gym, and you’ll see this in a variety of ways.

For baseball players, especially pitchers, you might see someone mistakenly having them do long tosses during the off -season, or throwing a heavier ball, trying to make the arms stronger in that specific movement pattern. Instead, what’s happening, as we’ve already discussed a lack of off -season and overuse, you’re overly specific and you’re not giving those tissues a chance to recover. So ultimately your off -season training becomes an extension of the season and you’re not getting that break.

The goal of training in a gym is to focus on athletic qualities, not necessarily the movements. What does that mean? If I am playing a sport like football, I need to be explosive and powerful. So we want to train movements that are going to build my explosive capabilities like plyometrics, box squats, maybe some push press, maybe some Olympic lifts. If I have the inclination to do them without a whole lot of focus on learning new movement patterns. Because if we’re teaching people brand new movements, then I am focused on the movement pattern itself and not the qualities that it develops and I’m creating the same problem in a different way.

I am currently working with a cross -country runner and the strength training given to them in the off -season focuses a lot on strength movements done for very high repetitions. Essentially they’re trying to build endurance. Seems like that is a smart approach at first glance. However, we get to bullet point two we’re looking to plug holes in the athlete’s development. If your sport is cross -country, or I mean you’re just running 5k’s, or if you’re an endurance athlete in general, you do not need to use the weight room to build endurance. Your sport itself is entirely comprised of endurance and you’re getting plenty of training doing that already.

You would be better served spending your time in the gym working on power so that if you’ve got a hill, you can run up that hill and it’s not going to crush you. And maybe a little bit of upper body work and core work to focus on posture so that you can maintain your posture for longer and your breathing doesn’t get away from you. So, in that sense endurance of the upper body and endurance of those postural muscles as opposed to endurance of the lower body muscles would be a gap or a hole that you can plug.

We want to be as general in the off -season as possible. Your goal, in addition to building the athletic qualities that you need to be successful and plugging holes in particular, is to also prepare the tissues so that when you go into sport -specific training, they are ready to absorb the force that will be generated during the season. You can only do that by being overly general, focusing on broad athletic qualities like strength, power, agility, mobility, and flexibility. Doing all of these things in general, not necessarily specific movement patterns, will have the best carryover to the season.

I would say the most specific I would get during the off  season would be direct focus on rotational strength. For athletes that maybe swing a golf club or a baseball bat or a tennis racket, building that rotational strength is inherently ballistic. You’re going to be limited in the amount of loading that you can safely do. That would be about as specific as I would get when it comes to training qualities and that’s like when I say the most specific I would get, I mean that’s where you’re going to have the greatest overlap between an athletic quality and a movement pattern.

For everything else, squat. That’s going to build leg strength. You can do single leg squats. That’s going to build leg strength while you’re limited by balance, so it’ll also force you to balance and train through ranges of motion.

As it comes closer to the season, we do want to continue strength training to maintain a lot of this throughout the season. That is another problem that we run into with youth sports, and I will give my high school coaches a lot of credit for this. During football season we were still expected to have lifts a couple of days a week. Very small stuff but it was to maintain strength that we built during the offseason.

So that would be another thing is how do we work strength training into the season itself in such a way that it’s not going to create too much fatigue in conjunction with all the other training that we’re doing. The structure is going to change. The movements will largely stay the same and again we want to be general to prevent that overuse.

If you are interested in specifics, if you’re looking for how to train for a particular sport, what that might look like, an endurance sport versus a power sport. Versus something hybrid where you got, I would consider soccer to be a hybrid. It requires tremendous amounts of endurance. You’re running pretty much for 90 minutes. However, you are going between jogging, sprinting, cutting, lateral movement. There’s a lot of power components to it.

If you’re interested in learning what a particular program might look like to build those qualities, feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to provide examples. I wanted to keep this talk to be high level and theoretical in general, and you can get into specifics and examples from there.

I hope you guys enjoyed this. I hope it sparks a discussion because a lot of what I’m saying flies in the face of what a lot of coaches will tell you to do. Good, come see me. I’ll make your athletes unstoppable. Proof is in the pudding. If you enjoyed this video, give us a like, give us a subscribe. I’m happy to talk anytime. We’ll catch you guys next time.