Prioritising better physical development for young players
Something we have discussed before is the importance of young players in laying a proper foundation with age and ability appropriate training programs, rather than following adult ones, or even worse, trying to emulate high-level training programs designed for someone else. But in this discussion, we are going to expand a little more on the idea of physical literacy for young players. This has wide-raging effects, and whilst it isn’t a sexy topic – as evidenced by the fact that it goes largely ignored to the detriment of young players and all the younger generation today, it is vitally important.
The issue facing us today
This could be an entire book, so we will endeavor to keep it to just the important bear essentials. In a nutshell, society isn’t in very good physical condition. We know that, so lets not labour the point. The point is that because of the lifestyles that we lead today, with all the technology, the lack of outdoor activity and the lack of unstructured outdoor/physical play from younger ages, with every generation kids/teenagers/young adults have less and less of the vital general movement ability. Remember, we aren’t interested (in this discussion anyway) in the impact on society as a whole from this – rather we are only looking at its effect on sports participation and training – and at all levels – professional, semi-professional, amateur and junior.
‘Physical’ Education in schools? What ‘Physical?’
With every passing year, it appears that PE in schools becomes less and less physical. Yeh there might still be some kicking of a ball and some badminton and some European handball and these sorts of things, but they are games-based, rather than physical as such. In earlier generations, PE was just that – physical. Even if someone wasn’t very active away from PE, they could count on developing a degree of physical literacy from this lesson each day. Not only is this games-based style of PE providing less physical education for children and adolescents, but once hitting high school, it becomes more and more ‘academicised’ or theory-based. As Kelvin Giles says ‘these kids can hold a conversation with me about the krebs cycle or gas analysis or aerobic and anaerobic, but they walk up a flight of stairs and they are gasping for air.’
“Games used to be an offshoot of a movement-based, fitness curriculum. Then someone took the physical out of physical education, and it’s never recovered.”
“Unfortunately, physical education, that used to that one aspect of their lives that they could depend on to have regular physical activity – and it was physical – has gone.”
Kelvin Giles
This isn’t meant to be an article about what PE should or shouldn’t be. Indeed Kelvin Giles – whom we quote regularly on this topic – is very passionate about this and covers this in detail. However what we are highlighting here is that not only is there far less incidental physical development from leisure and play, but shockingly, far less of this key development coming from PE. In other words, we can’t just assume that development is occurring as much as it used to, and then just continue to do things (training and sport wise) the way we have always done them. This is because there is far less of an existing foundation there to build on.
Without a foundation – you can’t build high performance
This is important and where this discussion really ties in. High performance is generally seen to mean professional sport or semi professional sport, however high performance in general applies to everyone who plays seriously as any level of sport, and trains with their own level of high physical performance in mind.
“Even with 4-5-6-7-8 year olds, we cant brush the basics under the carpet. And I understand everyone clamours to get to the end-stage stuff – the sexy stuff. But you have got to earn the right to do the end stage stuff. In fact, you’ve got to earn the right to do sport-specific stuff. But we often move forward and fast track to the end stage stuff.”
“And everything we ever did – at the QAS, at the AIS, all the clubs I’ve worked at, when we go back to try to find the root cause of these problems, its right down to foundation movements!”
“We need to stop brushing the basics under the carpet – whether its to do with well being for the community, or its to do with high performance sport.”
Kelvin Giles
So what we have is teenagers for example, who haven’t developed the wide and deep movement vocabulary and physical ability, yet they are jumping into bench press and heavy deadlifts and Olympic lifting. It’s a recipe for disaster somewhere down the line. And the injury rates of kids participating in sports only backs up this point. Part of the problem is the myth of sport-specific focus from a young age. Playing more and more of the 1 sport, and sport only, without a greater emphasis on physical development during the formative years – to then build more and more sport specific focus on top of, without the risk of overuse injuries, and muscle imbalances, and ACL injuries, and muscle tears.
The role of clubs, or the role of individuals?
There isn’t the necessary foundation being built from PE and leisure and play, and as a result, this gaping hole must be filled elsewhere. But by whom?
“If you are expecting PE to give us physical literacy, forget it! Which means that clubs – with the 7,8 and 9 year olds coming in – they’ve got the be equipped to develop physical literacy before sport specific stuff. Are they equipped – no! Because coach education is all about technical and tactical!”
Kelvin Giles
The great difficulty for coaches of kids at clubs is not only that they perhaps don’t have the knowledge in this area – but more so that when parents drop off their kids at footy training – they expect them to be doing football-based training for the 60 or 75 minutes they are there. This is completely understandable, and indeed the kids themselves aren’t going to want to roll up to footy training, and do 50 minutes of movement-based development plus a few minutes of handball. But what can be done is the interweaving of the 2 – simple things like 5 minute breaks for movement literacy-based work. 3 or 4 x 5-minute movement breaks in a 75 minute training session. A simple layout like that.
The good thing in our sport is that this sort of discussion wouldn’t fall on deaf ears. Most people associated with the sport recognise the need for physical development and physical literacy, especially given the physical component to the game. An obvious comparison is the soccer world – which needs physical development and physical literacy of its young players every bit as much as footy does. Yet somewhere along the way, those associated with the sport have managed to convince themselves that their sport is completely removed from the rest of the sporting world and laws of physical development that apply to sport, and that ‘everything we need we can do with the ball.’ Football tends to operate in the world of ‘best practice’ at all levels, whether it is physical development, coaching, administration - and we can proudly look at the relatively cheap participation for kids when compared to a grassroots/junior sport like soccer. So there wouldn’t be much issue looking to implement this type of thing on a larger scale eventually, but there is no reason why individual coaches of kids (who often double as PE teachers during the week – and many of whom, from conversations with them, are frustrated by what the PE curriculum looks like these days) can’t already look to implement some of these things into training.
So what if nothing changes?
Lets say that nothing changes – after all, we know how resistant to change individuals but certainly departments can be (‘education’ for example.) Even when there is minimal resistance, the actual implementation can take time, and the fruits of the labour can take time to appear. So lets say you are a 14-20 year old, and you came through the school system with the usual minimal ‘physical’ in PE, and you played footy and cricket a couple times a week, but outside of that, the lions share of your leisure time was FIFA on Playstation, Facebook Messenger and Snapchat videos. But here in your mid-to-late teens you are waking up to physical development and wanting to develop as a football player. Or you are a parent of this teenager. What do you do or what can you do?
The most important thing you can do is to begin physical training with a medium-to-long term mentality, rather than a ‘put on 6 kg this off-season and train 6 days a week for the next 14 weeks’ mentality. Similarly, don’t fall into the trap of trying to emulate a high performance program of an AFL rookie or state level player.
Understanding that when starting out (in extra strength training, etc) your primary aim (regardless of what you may think it is – like getting bigger and stronger, and being able to tackle better) is to build a foundation of physical competence, with muscle balance, full range of motion, and a grounding in the foundation movements (squat, lunge, bend, push, pull, twist, brace and land.) Being able to do these things well, before loading them up with large amounts of external resistance. And not falling into the trap of just adding on useless size – which is a very easy trap to fall into. Too often there is a short terms view – ‘this coming season.’ Its understandable for young players to think that way – especially if they are heading into year 12 and are focused on cracking the 1st XVIII at school or the Under 18 side at Western Jets. However ask yourself to fast forward to being 21, and whether you would still like to be playing and improving at this age, or whether you would rather be completely stagnating because you are struggling with niggles, missing matches, and not developing physically either anymore, due to too much extra physical training as a 17 year old, and poor training practices, without laying a foundation first.
Each individuals journey through physical development and rate of progression will be different. This is a very broad and detailed topic. We will keep discussing this topic more and more, but Kelvin Giles and his website Movement Dynamics are a great starting resource for young players, parents and coaches alike on this topic.
If you would like more detailed and personalised direction, checkout our personalised online programming, or if you would prefer even more personalised and detailed in-person coaching (for those lucky enough to live in the beautiful city of Adelaide), check out our Athletic Development Coaching and Junior Athletic Development Coaching.
Strength Coach
