What do we do in the Defy Youth Program?
Over the past 8 months we’ve been building up basic movement patterns with our kids in our after school program. Doubling down on fundamental skills such as sprinting, jumping, throwing and lifting movements like pushing, pulling, squatting and hinging. We’ve progressed from bench pressing to overhead pressing. Inverted rows to pull ups. Goblet Squats to Back Squats and a whole bunch more cool exercises .
I’ve been working a lot with youth over the last 10 years and one thing I’ve commonly come across is over-specialization too early in a kid’s life. LTAD research shows that these areas need to be focused on when rounding out a well balanced approach to developing athleticism. They call them the 5 Basic S’s of Training and Performance: Stamina, Strength, Speed, Skill & Suppleness. So if we focus our programming around these 5 pillars plus adding in aspects that increase the amount of fun it is to both coach and participate in a session we’ll have put together an awesome experience for our youth to be involved in. Planning and timing is very important.
We’ve been building out our training phases in 3-4 week cycles depending on how much time we have in each term. Our Fall term has 16 weeks so we will be breaking it down into 4 phases. Our Winter term is usually 9-10 weeks and our spring term around 12-15 weeks long, so we like to use anywhere between 3-4 week phases and that allows us to accumulate more volume for all our speed, strength and conditioning movements. Our hope is that if the weather stays consistent then we can start working outdoors more often and getting our kids used to running outside!
Each phase will be progressing with new variations of basic speed and agility drills. We want to continue developing speed and athleticism by introducing new ways to load sprinting and jumping. Some examples of this are going to be band resisted sprinting to start along with loaded jumps with light med balls and/or bands. This is going to help us slow down both movements and break down the basics of running faster and jumping further or higher.
Down the road we want to be experimenting with sled loaded sprints and hopefully flying sprints when we get outside that will focus on more max velocity rather than acceleration. Later in our yearly training plan we plan on adding in more multi vector jumps which refers to moving through multiple planes when jumping. For example we started with a simple broad jump plus vertical jump in phase 1 phase 2 we introduced more rotational jumps and further into the year we’ll see jumps going left to right, forward and back on an angle and so much more multi vector jumps to challenge our power and spatial awareness.
In regards to strength development for youth athletes relative strength will be our main performance indicator. Examples of this are push up and pull up variations, sleds and carry variations and just about anything under the sun you can do with your bodyweight! We love to use gymnastic type movements to continue to develop our youths’ relative strength over the course of the year.
When it comes to coaching technology we experimented with the Dashr Laser system the last few terms and saw major success in tracking our kids jumps and sprints and heading into the new year. The lasers helped build a lot of buy-in to our sprint drills. Another main goal is to keep general baseline measurements of key performance indicators like our sprints and jumps is to measure our kids progress and analyze how our programming has been affecting them physically and emotionally. The plan is to host combines similar to our March Break and Summer Combines throughout the school year.
Now over time these numbers are going to help us track not only the progress of our kids but also readiness for a given session they might be involved in. For example a timed 10m sprint paired with a broad jump measurement at the beginning of the week or even the beginning of each session can help us determine how close to baseline a kid may be compared to the last result we have in the system can help us determine how ready they are for a given session. From there we can start adjusting how intense our session might be for a certain individual based on both physical demands as well as wellness monitoring such as sleep, hydration and overall stress level.
Additionally, who we deal with here at Defy isn’t always going to align with the LTAD Model. We don’t always work with athletes. We work with humans first which is why it’s important for us to understand why someone might be participating in any of our programs. Communication is key of course. Get to know what makes them tick. Listen more than we speak. And with any of our clients, adults or kids, we always want to play the long game. Turn the slow cooker on, not the pressure cooker. Especially with kids. We want them to develop a healthy relationship with movement that lasts a lifetime.
