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Brian Grasso - EzineArticles.com Expert Author
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- Flexibility For Young Athletes - Q & A With Chris Blake
[Recreation-and-Sports] Mobility can also have two ways of being defined. The main definition is the state of being in motion. But this state of motion can be looked at within certain joints (subtalar mobility) or as a physical whole (moving from one position into the next during a run).
- The Functional & Athletic Aspects Of Training Figure Skaters
[Recreation-and-Sports:Figure-Skating] Within the sport of figure skating there seems to be a dichotomy in terms of the conditioning efforts prescribed by training experts or professionals. On one side, there exists the 'traditionalists' who tend to offer up basic exercises such as bench press, squats and lat pull down supplemented with off-ice versions of on-ice skills.
- Flexibility More Than Stretching
[Recreation-and-Sports] Flexibility is a very misunderstood concept. For starters, flexibility and stretching have long been considered to be the same thing, when in fact, they're not. Performing basic static stretches (like a standard hamstring or calf stretch) can certainly increase the resting length and decrease the tone of a given muscle, but that may have little to no effect on the actual flexibility that a young athlete has.
- Flexibility for Young Athletes - Q & A With Dr Kwame Brown
[Recreation-and-Sports] Dr. Kwame Brown has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and is a founding member of the IYCA. First question, What is the difference between Flexibility and Mobility?
- Flexibility for Young Athletes - Q & A With Bill Hartman
[Recreation-and-Sports] What is the difference between Flexibility and Mobility? Technically speaking based on textbook definitions there may be no difference, but I do tend to separate the two. Your simple textbook definition of flexibility is movement about a joint.
- Flexibility - Are We Hurting Kids?
[Health-and-Fitness:Exercise] The scope of confusion regarding flexibility can be seen when considering the assessment tools most commonly used to test one's suppleness. The standard 'sit & reach' test is most often incorporated into pre-training assessments as the 'flexibility test'.
- The Concepts of Multilateral Development
[Recreation-and-Sports] Without question the most mismanaged collection of athletes in North America are young athletes. They are encouraged to emulate professional sporting starts, criticized for efforts that 'don't measure up' and are often guided by well-intentioned yet largely uneducated coaches who don't understand the concepts involved with developmental athletics.
- Sport Diversity - The Application Behind The Theory
[Recreation-and-Sports] Multilateral development is a theory which urges young athletes to participate in several sports over their childhood and adolescent periods prior to specializing in one. The basis is that varied athletic stimulus will serve to broaden the youngsters' 'warehouse' or 'portfolio' of general athletic ability and develop a thorough or expansive base on which to build and eventually specialize. While the concepts are well known and the research citing success far reaching, it is still not an embraced reality within North American youth sports.
- A Practical Way to Prevent Overtraining
[Recreation-and-Sports] In working with young athletes, there is very little reason to ever 'test' their ability at certain lifts or speed variances. Your programming guidelines must be based around instilling proper execution of technique in your young athletes from a lift and movement economy standpoint.
- Overtraining - Part 2
[Recreation-and-Sports] In my last article on overtraining, I offered the suggestion that as trainers and coaches, we must take a deeper look at how we program for and train our athletes. I have made a career out of advocating for the use of more moderate training intensity's and volumes with young athletes, but this goes even further - it goes to the route of our programming abilities and skills. How much time do we truly spend in designing, monitoring and dynamically adjusting our training programs?
- Overtraining - Part 1
[Recreation-and-Sports] As a Coach, you sometimes feel as though you must have your athletes walk away from a training session dripping with sweat and barely able to open their car doors. After all, if they don't feel as though you are 'training them hard enough', they may opt to go and seek the services of a different Coach.
- Speed Training
[Recreation-and-Sports] As the parent of a young athlete, this is going to be the most important article you ever read. It has to do with speed training and, as a parent, what you likely don't know about that topic. More over, the incorrect information that many other Trainers and Coaches are giving you.
- How to Warm-up Your Young Athletes
[Health-and-Fitness:Exercise] Warming up for sport or activity is, in essence, preparing the body for the task it is about to do. This includes increasing body temperature and improving the efficiency of the nervous system (which controls movement).
- Kids and Exercise Machines
[Kids-and-Teens] Many studies done the world over have concluded that strength based training programs done on this kind of fitness equipment is very safe for young children (again under appropriate guidelines). My issue is not whether or not kids CAN perform this kind of training, my question is WHY they need to.
- Plyometrics - How Watered Down Can It Get?
[Health-and-Fitness:Exercise] Plyometric training has become such a 'catch-phrase' in the vernacular of trainers and coaches that it is often marketed as a sole measure of distinction for a training facility or individual coach/trainer. Do you know how many sporting clubs, for instance, have told me that they would love to have their athletes train at my facility, but their Director of Coaching has a 'plyometric class' that he/she hosts every week and that's all the conditioning they need?
- Why Do You Test Young Athletes?
[Health-and-Fitness:Exercise] How to test a group of young athletes has become a popular 'discussion board' question recently. I have seen this query raised on several prominent websites and have been asked about it a great deal over the last few months.
- The Machine Myth - Get Kids OFF Those Machines!
[Health-and-Fitness:Fitness-Equipment] Whenever I come into contact with a coach or trainer who preaches the virtues of machine-based strength training for young athletes, the same argument is typically offered - machines are safer for kids because they eliminate the dangerous aspects of traditional free weight training. This is simply a dogmatic mindset and not founded on any scientific or functional principles. It is a classic case of blaming the exercise or activity rather than the execution.
- Goal Confusion
[Recreation-and-Sports] You really could open an interesting debate with respect to teaching sporting skills to kids. I did last week during a presentation I gave to area basketball coaches. Some trainers and coaches have decided that the skills required to achieve a certain task should be taught from the beginning.
- Elite Athletes
[Recreation-and-Sports] Just because a 14 or 15-year-old kid happens to excel at a given sport and play at a high level does not necessarily earn them the designation of 'elite.' The status of Elite Athlete is reserved, not for adult athletes only, but for those individuals whose life and purpose revolves around succeeding in a particular sport.
- Coordination and Movement Skill Development - The Key to Long Term Athletic Success
[Recreation-and-Sports] The key ingredient to working with pre-adolescent and early adolescent athletes is providing global stimulation from a movement perspective. Younger athletes must experience and eventually perfect a variety of motor skills in order to ensure both future athletic success and injury prevention. Developing basic coordination through movement stimulus is a must, with the eventual goal of developing sport-specific coordination in the teenage years.
- Sports ALL Kids Should Play
[Recreation-and-Sports] One of the questions that I get asked most routinely is which sports I believe offer the best development capacity to young athletes. This is a loaded question for several reasons...
- Teaching Technique - Laying the Foundation for Sporting Excellence
[Recreation-and-Sports] Demonstrating good technique from a sporting perspective involves applying optimal movement ability in order to accomplish or solve a particular task effectively. A young athlete, for instance, who demonstrates sound technical ability while running is getting from point A to point B in an effective manner. Technical ability in a sport is typically the underlying measure for potential success.
- Plan For Success
[Recreation-and-Sports] The most common problem facing Trainers & Coaches today with respect to developing young athletes over time is the ability to plan long-term. The personal training and coaching professions are most typically based on a session-to-session consideration - clients pay per session most often and Trainers create training programs one session at a time. The same is true for coaching sport - most Coaches script out one practice plan at a time, rather than create a relative flow for an entire month or even season.
- Importance of Play
[Recreation-and-Sports] A common misconception within the North American youth sporting world is the concept of 'play' for conditioning purposes. All too often, well intentioned youth sport coaches or trainers follow the leads established by the elite members of there respective sports and configure training programs and sessions into hard-droving or 'endless repetitions of one exercise' type affairs. It cannot be overstated enough how much this practice is counterproductive and impeding to the optimal development of young athletes.
- Coaching - Think Outside the Box
[Self-Improvement:Coaching] This is a common concern I see especially with younger coaches just out of college and still looking to impress people with there high intellect and advanced vocabulary. In fact, out industry is littered with coaches who talk a great game, seek out as much PR and notoriety as they can, but don't truly have any degree of experience or ability when it comes to effectively applying training strategies to athletes in unique and varying settings.
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