I can remember the first time I consciously chose to work
out on my own. I stared into the mirror and a chunky, four eyed, freckled boy
looked back at me. High school was just one year away, and my only goal at this
time was to play college football. Before I could even lace up at a university,
I would have to dominate in high school. Unfortunately, like the mirror
expressed, I was far from being a functioning athlete. So as a budding junior-high
flower, my father went out of his way to buy me a weight set. That was the
beginning of the end for me, kids.
Unfortunately, I find many parents are afraid to let their
kids lift weights. Sure, putting them through hours of repetitive motion is
okay, but how dare we let them lift. In aspect to youth fitness, it amazes me
how far behind USSR Russia we are. According to “Secrets of Soviet Sports
Fitness and Training,” by Michael Yessis, children were not allowed to
specialize in a sport until they had gone through several years of generalized
fitness. Why? Because they realized teaching a kid how to function prevents
injury and increases later performance.
Lately I have been pursuing the opportunity to work with
youth select sport teams. I’ve been informed, a dozen or so times, that the
parents will not want their “future hall of famer” to do generalized fitness;
they want specialized training. It sucks. That is literally the only way I can
describe it.
On the other hand, I have been hired to write a workout regimen
for home school girls. This has allowed me to dump the knowledge I have about
generalized fitness onto them. Now, I’ve said generalized fitness four times
without explaining what I mean.
What do you think of when you hear generalized fitness? To
me, I imagine pushups and jumping jacks. And honestly, that’s a huge portion.
But another asset to generalized fitness is learning biomechanics.
Biomechanics is the
study of the mechanical laws relating to the movement or structure of living
organisms. If kids don’t know how move their bodies, then they will
sacrifice power and health. I don’t care how specialized you are, an injury is
an injury. So before I even think about teaching a volley ball player how to
use her trunk to increase the velocity of her swing, I will teach her proper
thoracic components; i.e. she will learn how to do a pushup.
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what the heck are they doing? |
Eric Lay, the
head trainer at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School, did a
personal study with his athletes. What he realized was equal parts upsetting
and informative. His “elite” soccer players could barely muscle out a proper
pushup. In a young athletes life, somewhere between orange slices and keeping
score, parents and coaches have been neglecting generalized fitness.
To me, starting
with generalized fitness makes perfect sense. If you can’t run a mile you don’t make someone
run a marathon. But with our kids we are doing just that. Girls are destroying
their ACLs because we are teaching them to dribble a ball before we teach them
knee mechanics. Half of the general population doesn’t know how to run right,
because we teach our kids to walk and then jump straight into specialized
sports.
Most of the Endu
readers don’t have kids. In fact roughly 80% are college age; so I’m not
starting a revolution. But when that day comes and we have kids, remember to
teach them fitness before sports.
Fun quote from a Jewish story I heard one time: "Children may be our future, but our elders are one generation closer to GOD."
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