One of the best things that young athletes can do for their performance is get into training early. Upon entering a space like Ethos Performance, a young athlete is exposed to the practices, attitudes and influences of some of the best athletes and coaches in the country and surrounded by knowledge. Reading this, as a coach or parent, you might be excited at the idea of propelling your son, daughter, niece or nephew’s performance in a space like ours! And if you are, I’m glad to hear it, but in this blog I want to communicate an extremely important caveat to this excitement…

The best way to communicate this is through an analogy. Without the interference of any coach, the amount of development that happens throughout childhood, teenage years through to late teens and early adulthood is humongous. From developing social circles, the hectic stages of puberty and general maturation, growth spurts, performing at school, performing in sport, managing inter-sibling wars, there is no lack of craziness in the lives of young people. An analogy for this is the difference between cooking a Christmas Turkey and Minute Steak. The Christmas Turkey has many parts + a huge piece of meat and because of this, a 3+ hour cooking time. It’s also, arguably, better tasting than a minute steak. But if you try to cook a turkey like a minute steak, you’ll have an undercooked turkey and a whole lot of salmonella.

So what is there to learn about Youth Athletic Development from the kitchen? If you want to make drastic improvements in the performance of youth athletes in short amounts of time, you might be wasting your time for various reasons. This blog aims to make the case for ‘slow cooking’ youth athlete development. Read on if you’re curious as to why…

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

I remember as a young athlete being driven to bowl as fast as Brett Lee and play cricket for Australia. I think most young kids had a dream like this. I wanted to achieve this dream ASAP. This urgency was reinforced by representative sport trials, state sport trials, school sport trials, school state trials etc which all reinforced a few things. If you didn’t make it in the next trial, you missed out, you’re behind the pack and you’re 5 steps back from where you could’ve been had you made the team. This is a hefty weight on the shoulders of many athletes and parents. And in my opinion it’s a weight not worth carrying because…

You’d rather play the long game

The concept of mastery is one that athletes often strive for, but maybe not often enough. Mastery means “comprehensive knowledge or skill in a particular subject or activity” and comprehensive means “including or dealing with all or nearly all elements or aspects of something.” Basically, completely understanding every piece of skill required for the athlete to excel in their sport both in practice and in concept. Mastery will not be obtained at 18 years old, I repeat:

MASTERY WILL NOT BE OBTAINED AT 18, 19 or 20 YEARS OLD

And it’s for one simple reason, time is undefeated. Imagine your favourite athlete when they started their training journey. For them to get to where they are now, they have required not only every piece of training they’ve done, but also every life experience, hurdle, other sport experience, strength & conditioning etc for them to get there. 1 year ago they weren’t who they are now, 5 years ago (while they were amazing) they weren’t who they are now because time is undefeated.

Consider a situation where two 14 year old athletes have the exact same goal, play for their country. One athlete is told to work hard with consistency and patience, put the rush to the side and embrace an inherantly long process and to avoid losing enjoyment for the sport and neglecting other areas of their life. The other athlete is training 6 days a week, parents are ensuring they never miss an opportunity for extra drills, parties are unattended or left early so they can properly prepare for their 6am session… I think we know who might last longer in the sport.

So what does this mean for the approach to training?

If we know mastery can’t be obtained anytime soon, you may as well hunker down for a long ride

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

Another experience that’s relateable for any athlete trying to be the best they can be is cramming as much work in as possible and ramping up the intensity of these sessions. The more training I do the better right? Yes, pretty much, and there’s a way to do it right. A very simple way of doing it wrong is going as hard as you can every day and holding onto this for as long as you can. This is like hanging off a cliff with one hand, either you succumb to the pain or the muscles wear out, either way you fall off a cliff (i.e. the athlete quits or gets injured).

This approach is especially harmful. What needs to be remembered about the life of a young person is that we create mental assocations with each new experience we have. For example, if we feel like we should be working as hard as possible every day, through injury and pain because otherwise everyone will fly past me, then we ultimately reduce the chance of mastery being attained. Why? Because accumulated high quality training is what matters, it doesn’t matter if you shot 100 shots if you were too tired to focus on actually making shots with effective technique because you reinforce bad habits.

So what do we do instead of consistent hard work? The same thing, approached differently.

Look at training like waves at the beach. They start building up well before you can even see them, then they approach the sand slowly building up their size, then they crash on the sand, which is followed by a slow and easy pulling back of the water.

For example, if Game Day was Saturday, Sunday = no training, Monday = low workload, Tuesday = Moderate-High workload, Wednesday = easy skills and drills/nothing, Thursday = Moderate-High workload, Friday = low workload and high intensity, then repeat the cycle. Let the wave build, crash and reset.

lay the groundwork

For the youth athlete, as important as improving performance and skills in specific sports, it’s just as important to develop a broad array of ‘tools’. The concept of “ early specialisation” has been re-iterated and condemned many times in past years, and for good reason. Early specialisation is a trend among talented and/or passionate young athletes (more often parents) who recognise a need to improve skills so that one day they can play professionally. This is all good and well, but with a glaring misunderstanding of what will create a successful athlete, and more importantly, a happy person.

As we spoke about above, the athletes who can achieve more ‘reps’ and achieve more high quality exposures to their sport ultimately win the race to mastery. This doesn’t only apply to specific sporting skills though. It applies to all elements of being an athlete, specific or non-specific the sport of focus. For example, if your main sport is cricket and you play that in summer and play AFL in the winter, you’ll develop qualities like aerobic fitness, sprinting speed, jumping and leaping, more variety in catching tasks, rapid decision making and kicking that will not have been specifically developed had you played winter cricket or indoor cricket.

To continue with the cricket example, we know that sprinting speed can correlate to fast bowling performance (with specific bowling actions), we also know that the physical fitness of cricketers is vital to withstand the high playing volumes of test match cricket just to name a few examples of very transferrable skills.

As a young cricketer I remember seeing how athletic the cricketer who spent the winter playing AFL was. If you take this same concept outside of the realm of skill development, the young athlete also widely broadens their social circle, exposes different lessons surrounding things like coach-athlete relationships and team environments and learnings of different cultures and expectations in different sports. We also know that among populations like fast bowlers, stress-related injuries like stress fractures in the lower back are highly common. While not completely preventable, we can offset their early impact by increasing variety of loads on the body.

A great analogy for this is training on a grass field. If I spend all my time in one corner of the field, that grass will turn to mud and it will take longer to recover this grass. If I vary the spot that I train on in this grass field I won’t ruin any one part of the field and it won’t take long for the grass to recover itself, because the load has been spread.

If young athletes specialise early, for performance, sociocultural skills, relationships and injury risk the delayed return on investment that comes with increased variety throughout their career pays off in droves. Don’t forget that there is a time and place to specialise, but limit this specialisation to >16 years old so that the athlete has had a chance to develop a broad range of athletic skills prior to finally choosing and specialisaing in a sport.

So, the goal of youth athletic development is much like building any structure. Develop not just a strong, but a WIDE framework so that they have more tools at their disposal in order to ultimately create a higher cieling.

when to go offroad

A failing of any individual who works with athletes is to view the athlete as an athlete, and not a whole person. Different people respond to identical stimuli in varied ways. A great example is taking your car off roading. When you read that last sentence you fell into one of three camps:

“Please and thankyou, my car is more than ready for off roading and it will thrive. I can’t wait to solve the many problems that will inevitably come with it and I’m ready to spend the money it’ll likely require”
“I think the car can take it, but the toll it’ll take on my pocket and my overall time and energy will make me never want to go off roading ever again”
“My Toyota Corolla is not built for this, I’m out”

Just like the proposition of taking your car through the mud, hills and trees is more than just an issue of the car but whether or not your mentally and financially ready, athletic performance will ask a lot of you. What we tend to neglect is our own misunderstanding for the actual hurdles that young athletes will need to overcome. We look at young ‘Tommy’ and decide that his body will tolerate the hard training and thus should train hard. What we forget is that while we’re ‘throwing cricket balls’ at them and incessantly providing our well-meaning feedback, you can overload their mental capacity as well as their physical.

What is commonly communicated is that hard work will get you results. What’s probably more important in youth is knowing the importance of hard work and persistence, but only reaching your capacity for this work periodically. Just like taking your car off road, every car has it limits and the trick to getting the most out of your car is knowing where that capacity is and when you need to take a look under the hood to make sure it’s good to go out again. Feel free to send it through the hills but there’s no need to try to do this weekly because your car might spend longer in repairs in the year than it does on the road because you went too hard, too soon and too often.

conclusion

To complete this blog, a parting message is to consider the development of our youth athletes as people first and athletes second. Think about how many people you know who are making a living out of being an athlete, and if they are, how long that stands to last. It’s probably more important, in that case, to think about what is to be learnt from the process of improvement as opposed to only thinking about the improvement itself. Can we create well rounded young women and men who are also good at sport or must we continue ending careers early due to excessively high stress placed on the outcome of sport. We want to fan their flame, not blow the fire out.

Slow cooking youth athletic development