This is an article I wrote about my experience at the Titleist Performance Institute's (TPI) Junior Coach Program. Keep in mind that it was originally written for strength coaches and personal trainers, although I tried to revise it a little to make it a little easier to read.
Last winter I attended the TPI Junior Coach certification. One of the strengths of TPI is its advisory board. For their Junior Coach program, they have assembled some of the world's top researchers, coaches, and doctors with respect to childhood development, to be on the advisory board. The board includes people like Istvan Balyi, who coined the term Long Term Athletic Development (LTAD); Brian Grasso, the founder of the IYCA; and among other top minds, Dr. Ernst Zwick, David Donatucci, and Al Vermeil. With the help of this incredible advisory board, TPI has come up with a brilliant system to train children. At the workshop, they make a very solid case for kids to be starting "deliberate play" at the ages of 5 and 6.
The LTAD approach is "the life-long athletic performance development model," which has been adopted by many countries and organizations, including TPI and USA Hockey, and "focuses on having kids perform age-appropriate skill acquisition drills to maximize athletic potential. It gets progressively more specialized as the athlete develops and reaches the next level of development."
Tudor Bompa stated "From early childhood to maturation, people go through several stages of development, which include pre-puberty, puberty, post-puberty and maturation. For each development stage, there is a corresponding phase of athletic training."
So what exactly are these "age-appropriate acquisition drills"? To answer that we need to look at what Titleist calls "Physical Literacy." Physical Literacy is the "development of fundamental movement skills (FMS) and fundamental sport skills (FSS) which allow a child to move confidently and efficiently in a wide range of physical activities. A child should be physically literate by the onset of the growth spurt." For girls, peak height velocity averages 12 years old and for boys, it's 14.
First, let's look at fundamental movement skills. They are general patterns of movement that combine two or more body segments and according to Dr. Vern Seefeldt, director of the Youth Sports Institute at Michigan State, they are the "basic vocabulary of sport." FMS are broken up into four categories:
• Locomotive Skills- running, jumping, dodging, skipping, hopping, bounding
• Stability Skills- agility, balance, coordination, speed, change of direction
• Manipulative/Object Control Skills- throwing, kicking, striking, catching, dribbling
• Awareness- spatial, kinesthetic, and body awareness; rules
To help children develop the important FMS, Titleist came up with the Cyclone Circuit, as discussed in Greg Rose's article at MYTPI.com. The Cyclone makes the introduction to FMS and all four categories above really fun for kids, a crucial part of keeping them interested.
After a solid base of FMS, kids can transition into fundamental sport skills, which are basically skills that are more specific to the tasks of that sport, with much more complex movements. Skipping over the fundamental movement skills and jumping too quickly into fundamental sport skills (Early Specialization) can rob a kid of the proper development. "A child who develops a better base of FMS will develop sport skills at a faster rate and peak at a higher level of expertise." It's building the foundation before the rest of the house.
Make them athletic first, teach them the sport skills second.
There is also the issue of the "10 Year/10,000 hour rule," popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, although studies on the "10 Year Rule" have dated back to the early 80s. The rule states that it takes a minimum of 10 years and 10,000 hours of training for an athlete to reach elite levels.
The 10,000 hours has been debated, and much of the debate about how many hours is required (some show 4,000, some show 6,000), is "due to the lack of agreement between experts on what they consider practice." The Cyclone could be considered "deliberate play" and many experts not only emphasize the importance of deliberate play but consider it to be a form of practice.
So essentially, all the hours kids spend in the Cyclone (remember, this is LTAD, they might spend 3 years in this phase), working on fundamental movement skills, counts towards the 10,000 hour rule.
By not offering some kind of program to help children develop a better base of FMS between the ages of 5 and 9, we are not only doing a disservice to them but we are making our jobs harder and less effective. Never mind the sports skills, but the skill-based movements that we do as strength coaches in the gym like Olympic lifting, plyometrics and agility drills will be harder to teach as well.
Still Not Sold?
So let's assume that you still think that kids don't need this type of program and will develop FMS on their own in the playground and at school. I think the most compelling reason to be training them at this age comes from the theory of "Windows of Trainability." Many experts (including Bouchard, Malina and Bar-Or in Growth, Maturation and Physical Activity; Balyi and Way; Dr. Ernst Zwick and Dr. Liam Hennessey) believe "that there are sensitive periods or critical times in every child's life where certain skills can be learned at an accelerated rate." "There will be certain times in a child's development, that the body is more responsive to certain skills due to changing growth velocity." Balyi and Way described the "Five S's" that have windows of optimal training:
• Stamina (Endurance)
• Strength
• Speed
• Skill
• Suppleness (Mobility)
Let's look at the research for the Windows of Trainability with respect to Speed and Suppleness.
According to the research, there are two windows of opportunity to develop speed, with boys and girls being different. The first window for boys, is between the ages of 7-9, for girls 6-8. The focus at this stage is agility, quickness, change of direction, linear, lateral and multi-directional speed. The duration of the intervals/activities should be 5 seconds and under. All of these qualities are being "trained" during the Cyclone, and the kids never even know it. They're just having fun, getting more athletic and developing speed and agility properly. The second window for boys is between 13-16 and girls 11-13. The question becomes: "Can they be as fast as possible while training in the second window if they missed the opportunity in the first window?"
For suppleness, the research shows the optimum times for both boys and girls are between the ages of 6 and 10, then again during peak height velocity (for girls 12 years old and for boys, it's 14). Again, all of the movements in the Cyclone are helping kids develop optimal mobility at the most opportunistic time. We all know how important mobility is.
Could we be missing out on an opportunity to help kids become better athletes, regardless of what sport they are playing? It's possible.
Will it be a lot of work? Yes it will, but it sure seems worth it.
Also worth it is the TPI Junior Coach program. If you have an opportunity to go, it's an eye opening experience. All of the information in this article was plagiarized from the workshop textbook.
For more info about the Five Iron Fitness Junior Program, click here.
