Kids have more potential for long-term success when perfect form and fundamentals are emphasized early on. When these fundamentals are ignored, gaps in performance will become evident in the form of stalled progress or injury, and will force the athlete to scale back to address the issues.

Specializing kids at an early age at the expense of fundamentals can lead to big problems later on. [Photo courtesy Pixabay]

Youth Don’t Need to Specialize, Just Move

As parents and coaches, we have a responsibility to give our kids the best opportunities in sports and for living more physically vital lives. But specialized training is not where our youth should focus. High school will offer plenty of opportunity and pressure for thinks like hitting lessons, pitching lessons, advanced strength, and plyometric training.

These are my general recommendations to parents for their child’s athletic development:

• Sit less
• Limit screen time
• Play many active games
• Play outside (if they don’t have scrapes, bumps, and bruises, they aren’t being a kid)
• Don’t specialize in one sport until late high school at the earliest
• Limit soda and avoid making candy a substitute for meals

Kids need to move and play. Our education system is failing in this regard. Play is great for mind and body and is the best way to develop a child athletically early on. If parents understand and implement these tenets and want more athletic development, I recommend they allow their son or daughter to try the following workout a few days a week on non-consecutive days.

Slow Is Smooth – Smooth Is Fast

For this workout to be effective, emphasis must be on perfect form and technical execution. As in all sports, the fundamentals are fundamental. I’ve borrowed the following mantra to guide this template from the Army’s Basic Training: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” Break the movements down until they are smooth.

Perform the following 4-round circuit on 2-3 non-consecutive days a week. Aim to progress each week.

• Plank: For time. No sagging in the hips. Back should be flat enough to hold cup of water.
• Jump Rope: Twenty jumps minimum in the first week. Progress as needed.
• Inverted Row: Isometric hold at the top with elbows at 90 degrees. Your kids can also hang from a pull up bar. If they can do five or more full reps with good form, they can progress to where the body is still and the movement only comes from the elbows tracking back.
• Wall Squat x 5: Practice staying on heels and getting closer to wall. Arms inside thighs.
• Hand-Elevated Push Up: Once they can do 12 perfectly, progress to ground. Hips can’t sag and elbows must track backwards. If you can’t do a perfect push up, do a push up isometric hold with elbows at 90 degrees for time.
• Wall Sit: For time. The legs and hips must be at a 90-degree angle for this to be beneficial.

Finish the workout with 5-10 twenty-yard sprints. These are great to do barefoot on a surface free of rocks and sticks that is somewhat uneven. Shoes make it possible for kids to heel strike, a poor technique that is awful for shins and will slow your children down immensely. Another alternative is to sprint up hills. Sprints teach the body to synchronize and fire motor units faster and more smoothly.

Print a few copies of this log to help track progress: 

Click the image for a printer-friendly version.

Lay Perfect Bricks, Build a Perfect Wall

At my school, we have a quote from Will Smith that we embrace:

“You don’t try to build a wall. You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say ‘I’m gonna lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid,’ and you do that every single day, and soon you have a wall.”

Training adolescents is all about progression. Strength gains will be fast at first, but they will soon plateau. Help kids develop the right mindset by emphasizing that strength and conditioning is a long game that takes consistency over time. Process-oriented goals work. Set the foundation early by teaching children how to focus on progression and good mechanics, and the rest will follow in time.

Why shouldn’t kids train for specific sports early?

Don’t Race: The Cost of Early Athletic Specialization

More on the ins and outs of coaching kids:

Junior Athlete Strength and Conditioning: Your Role as a Coach

The post Athletic Training for Pre-Adolescents appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

With the passing of Title IX over forty years ago, the participation of girls in sports has gone up ten times over that period. Yet, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF), most girls aren’t playing sports past the age of fourteen, reporting that twice as many girls as boys quit sports.

As I watch my daughters’ schoolmates become distracted by fashion and make-up, it’s common to see them trade their cleats for heels, their caps for perfectly coifed hair.

When my daughter Mina competed in the CrossFit Teen Gauntlet, it was glaring to me how the participation of girls dwindled as the age category went up. And as a mother to athletes and a coach to teen girls, I often wonder how to keep girls in the game longer.

The WSF suggests that a primary reason girls leave sports at the cusp of adolescence is the societal bombardment that a girl’s looks is what gives her value.

The internet, television programming, songs, advertisements, videos, billboards, movies, and magazines that target tween and teen girls push an over-sexualized aesthetic that is disturbing. The average female is exposed to over three hundred ads a day.

It is hard to fight the never-ending onslaught of messages that nothing is as important or gains a girl power more than her looks – or more, a fabricated, cookie-cutter idea of perfection that is nearly impossible to obtain.

As a girl settles into puberty, the images of teen and adult female athletes fade. According to Images of Us Sports, women’s sports are only 8% of all print and TV sports media coverage.

The messages surrounding girls and the pressure to fit into a beauty-driven aesthetic can be overwhelming and often her athletic side doesn’t make the cut.

This is not to say a girl can’t be athletic and explore a glamorous side, but the rate at which girls drop out of sports suggests that they often do not choose both.

Another reason girls quit sports early is to escape ridicule. Middle school was so hard, wasn’t it? It still is. And now the wildfire that is technology has created a much more powerful form of humiliation via texts and the Internet.

Girl athletes are still labeled as “dude-like” or tagged as lesbian whether accurate or not. Don’t sweat too much, play too intensely, or, God forbid, beat a boy for fear of standing out and someone taking notice enough to crush you back into the fold with shame.

The brave few stick it out. The rest of us get swallowed up in our need to simply fit it. And this retreat is at the expense of our girls’ confidence and health.

It’s no secret that keeping and staying physically active has immediate and long-terms positive effects on our health, not just physically but emotionally and mentally.

Girls who participated in high school sports are more likely to complete college than those who don’t. The de-emphasis of women and girls to participate in regular activity is taking a toll not just on their health, but the health of our country.

According to Her Life Depends On It II, a comprehensive study by the WSF, girls and women who do not participate in sports are more likely to face heart disease, depression, substance abuse, cancer, obesity-related issues, eating disorders, suicide, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, osteoporosis, and smoking – all of which accounts for much of the more than one trillion dollars spent on healthcare for treating these issues.

Heart disease is the number one killer in this country for men and women, but every year more women than men die of heart attacks and cardiovascular disease.

Among women, 38 percent die within one year of their first recognized heart attack, compared with 25 percent of men. Similarly, 46 percent of female and 22 percent of male heart attack survivors have a disability from heart failure within six years.

Despite this ever-expanding body of research, in general girls are still not encouraged or given the opportunities extended to boys to participate in sports and fitness activities.

Limited access to opportunities especially for girls from a lower economic background remains an ongoing concern and is complicated by schools cutting back on recess and physical education nationally. Persistent inequalities in school sport programs and community-recreation programs for girls widens the gap.

The expense on the country due to our failing health only increases in all areas, yet many reports from the Surgeon General to countless doctors site physical exercise as well as good nutrition as part of a preventative plan against these factors. But if only half the population gets sincere support to participate, we are doing our country and citizens a disservice.

The unconscious acceptance and bombardment to instead promote a better looking girl as opposed to a healthy girl plays directly into these issues at the direct expense of our girls.

So, how do we keep girls active? Here are a few suggestions to keep them in the game:

1. Support her. Let your daughters, nieces, sisters, friends’ kids know how cool you think it is that they are active or play a sport whether they are the star of the team or the bench warmer. Go watch their games. Bring your friends. Often, we are unaware of the digging comments that might be said to her at school. Hearing your consistent and positive support can often offset that.
2. Let her play on her terms. Your daughter may not have the killer instinct to crush her opponents like you do. It’s okay. Let her find her own way in sports or a physical activity. Not being great at a sport doesn’t mean she’s not reaping a ton of other benefits and setting up a lifelong love of being active. Conversely, if your daughter is a gym rat and crazy competitive – maybe unlike you – this is okay, too. If you let her, she’ll probably impress you to no end. Knowing that someone is on her side as opposed to trying to get her to either “Get the ball, God!” or be more “lady-like” will most likely create a more well-adjusted and balanced person than not. Be her cheerleader, however she expresses athleticism.
3. Give her role models. Take her to a pro women’s soccer game or tennis match. Or a women’s collegiate basketball game. Let her witness women in sports being celebrated regularly. Taking Mina to watch the SoCal CrossFit Regional competition helped her redefine what women were capable of strength-wise. She has wanted that for herself ever since. As her mom or dad, you are your daughter’s first role model. Let her watch you workout or play something or express your own love for dance or running or however you like to move.
4. Let her know that being athletic is beautiful, too. Talk to her about advertising and the pressure to look a certain way. Often, they don’t really want to look like everyone else. They mainly want to stop feeling pressured and if you discuss this with her, she’ll realize that it’s ok for her to want her own look, her own style – that being active is just as beautiful as anything else.
5. Let her try different things. When a girl wants to quit a sport, it might not be that she wants to quit being active all together. She might be bored with volleyball. She might not like a non-team environment. Consider activities you wouldn’t do yourself and let her try new things.
6. Listen to her concerns about being teased. Understand and identify with her fears and talk to her about them. Girls want to fit in and be accepted. Let her know that sports and being on a team can be all about belonging, too. Most of us remember how nervous we were in junior high and high school classes. Many of us also have funny stories to tell about embarrassing things that did happen and how we got over them. Ask her what her worst fear is. Maybe she’s nervous about wearing the gym uniform or having to climb ropes in front of her classmates. Once she identifies the worst-case scenario, you can discuss how you would deal with this, which can alleviate some of her fears.

Keeping girls active can benefit them in so many ways. How are the girls in your life staying active? How do you personally keep them in the game?

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Keeping Girl Athletes in the Game appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The Teen Gauntlet CrossFit Competitions put on by CrossFit Kids are a series of national events meant to test the CrossFit skills of young athletes between the ages of 13-17. This Los Angeles competition was the second annual and this year attracted more than twice the number of kids as last year. Fifty-seven athletes in all competed, divided mainly by skill level: Novice, Junior Varsity, and Varsity.

The event was incredibly well run. Having taken my older daughter, Maya, to an endless number of Taekwondo tournaments, I know oh-too-well what a clustermess of a tournament can look like. Frankly, I haven’t seen a tournament run smoother. Every heat started on time. Briefings were clear. All questions were answered. All the competitors were gracious and sportsmanlike. The staff could not have been more accommodating and efficient. They made it a priority to keep athletes safe. Knowing a long day is ahead of you as a parent, athlete, or coach is tough, and the absence of unnecessary hiccups or delays was very much appreciated.

The workouts in the Gauntlet were nothing to sneeze at. I know every CrossFitting parent, spectator, and coach found themselves wondering how well they would fare in such a competition. The first workout of the event was to achieve as many rounds as possible in ten minutes of three handstand pushups, five pull ups, and fifteen air squats. The workout was the same for every division, however scaling options were allowed and sometimes required if athletes could not safely perform a movement no matter the division. The scores of scaled workouts would simply be placed behind the athletes who did the workouts as prescribed. The idea was to give everyone a chance to compete and enjoy the experience. Athletes who needed to scale appreciated getting into the action, as opposed to staring at the handstand wall for ten minutes, feeling embarrassed or less-than because they didn’t have this more advanced movement yet. Wisely, any athlete could scale any part of any workout throughout the day.

After the announcement of the first workout, I took Mina and Alana aside. I tried to gage the level of fear or excitement in their expressions. Mina, a born competitor, had done handstand pushups before but never in a workout and not without an inch mat under her head. But she couldn’t wait to give it a go in competition. Alana, my gentler warrior, gladly chose the scaled option of hand-release pushups because she needed to concentrate on her pull ups. She had just gotten her first pull up four weeks before. And though she was nervous to confront them in a competitive setting, I knew she was absolutely capable of handling the workout.

As the start time approached, their engines started to rev. I gave them a few tips to keep their shoulders as fresh as possible during the workout and a couple mental tips to stay in the game. I took each girl by the shoulders, catching them before they became too distracted by the internal chaos, and said, “Do exactly what you came here to do.” They both knew what I meant. We had talked about it for weeks. For Alana that meant pushing through the fear of not being able to do something on the spot. It meant giving all she could in that particular moment without being taken out by emotion. For Mina, it meant putting her competitiveness in a positive gear and letting her strength and skill take over, and also doing everything she could in that particular moment.

They stepped out onto the floor. Mina, visibly amped, stared at the wall against which she would do handstand pushups. Alana stared at the floor where she would do her pushups. She looked calm and not afraid. The noise and craziness of the surrounding fitness expo, where everything from Zumba shows and bodybuilding events were simultaneously going on, heightened in the huge hall seconds before the start. At “3, 2, 1, go,” Mina kicked up to the wall and easily banged out three handstand pushups like she was born to do so and Alana stuck to her exact strategy of doing one and two pull ups at a time to not waste reps or mental energy. The chaotic noise of the arena fell away and all I saw was the symphony of plan and movement strung together by mental strength. I choked up. They would be okay. They would be more than okay. These girls found a way to find their best selves when called upon. Can you ask for more from yourself, your student, your daughter?

It went on like this all day, through all three workouts over the course of a long event. I kept them rested, fueled, mobilized, moving, motivated, and every time they were called upon, they stepped up. The six weeks of dedicated training and preparing all paid off in their day to shine, and shine they did.

Lastly, I want to mention how prevalent the spirit of CrossFit was at the competition. Kids were congratulating each other between workouts. The staff was so supportive of the kids. The judges were serious, as if they were judging the stars of the CrossFit Games. A good number of my CrossFit friends showed up to cheer on the girls. And through my friend and Breaking Muscle’s own Dr. Lindsey Mathews, Mina got a phone call from her idol Lindsey Valenzuela – LINDSEY VALENZUELA – before her last workout. My tough warrior-girl beamed and shed a tear over the call. And that epitomizes CrossFit: the generosity of self to lift up others and better the community as a whole. If we give our all, then others give their all. It’s an amazing example to show our kids. We can’t wait for the next Gauntlet.

Photos provided by Danette “Dizzle” Rivera.

The post Our Amazing First Experience With the Teen Gauntlet CrossFit Competition Series appeared first on Breaking Muscle.