Conditioning for Today’s Young Athlete

By Bruce Cohn
Concord Journal, December 2002
 
Friends and casual acquaintances are often surprised when I explain to them what I do in my work as a strength and conditioning coach to help student-athletes improve their performance. They often remind me how lucky I am to be able to “play” for a living while remembering their own positive experiences playing sports. Adults often express regret that the type of conditioning programs that I run was not available when they were playing sports. It is these kinds of changes in youth sports that I want to address in today’s article.

When my peers and I think back to our playing days as kids it is a different world that we are remembering. Most of our games were informally organized around who was available to play in the neighborhood and consisted of running and jumping from playground to backyard to driveway to street. Here we organized our own ball games, combative, tag and running games. While we all played in adult-organized baseball, basketball and football leagues, the majority of our games were of our own device. In doing so we learned how to run faster, jump higher and get stronger.

Today’s young athletes practice and play more organized sports starting at a much younger age. This has made them more skilled in their individual sports but has not improved their general athleticism. Because of changes in family structure, parental work schedules and neighborhood dynamics they have less opportunity for free play of their own making. . I believe we are seeing more injuries in our young athletes because the structured nature of their play is not helping them find for themselves how to run faster, jump higher or get stronger. In short, their bodies are not prepared for the increased demands that playing sports at a higher level puts on them.

As our conditioning of young athletes evolves at FIT-TO-GO, I find we are returning to relays, drills and games that evoke memories of my playing past. We pride ourselves on teaching the latest training techniques to our student-athletes; but in those techniques I find many of the elements of what we did in our own free play. The difference is that nowadays we have to cue youngsters on the mechanics of how to run faster, jump higher or get stronger. This is not to say that things were better before. They are just different. Modern youth sports expose kids’ bodies to stresses at a younger age that require conditioning if aspiring athletes want to avoid injury and improve performance. And advances in exercise science have taught us how to do that better than ever. It is my hope that in teaching youngsters how to train we can re-capture some of the joy of free play.

Bruce Cohn is the Strength and Conditioning Coach at the Middlesex School in Concord. He runs FIT-TO-GO Total Sports Conditioning and is a nationally certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist. Bruce can be reached at 781-316-0061 or brucegym@rcn.com.