If you spend a game warming the bench, it can be frustrating. If you spend a season warming the bench, you have become better at precisely one thing: increasing the wood temperature. Every player, including Aaron Rodgers and Michael Jordan, has sat watching their teammates play at some point in their career. No one expects you to enjoy the situation, but how you handle it can stand you in good stead with your current coach and, more importantly, keep you involved in the sport for longer.

How much is enough playing time?

The answer is different at different levels of development. For young players learning the game, the answer is simple: you need to play. If you are only getting a few minutes here and there, you should consider moving to a different team or even sport, where you can get game time and have fun. Good coaches and teams recognize the need for everyone to play and be involved, which may mean running additional teams. At an early age, it should not be about winning championships but encouragement and participation.

In middle school, when children start to make more of their own decisions about sport, the two questions I would ask are:

1. Am I having fun?
2. Am I getting better?

If the answer to both of these is, ‘yes, then you are in a good place. You are enjoying the sport and improving. This is a perfect place to be, even if you aren’t the starter. However, people can get into your mind: teachers, parents, and other adults can all add their opinions, whether helpful or informed or not.

“You should be getting more game time,” and ”I don’t know why the coach is playing X. You clearly should be starting.” Those may seem positive but can give you a sense of either entitlement or resentment. Neither are positive character traits.

Coaches sometimes make mistakes on selection. They are human beings, after all. They may be focused on winning the match this weekend rather than looking after your future career.

If you are not improving and think lack of game time is the reason, you may have to switch clubs. However, at this level, that is more difficult.

Look In The Mirror

The hardest thing to do is look in the mirror and say, ‘What can I do to get better?’ Some things are out of your control: height, muscle fiber type, your parents, and being drafted by an NFL team with a 3-time league MVP starting at quarterback ahead of you (Brett Favre). But many things are within your control, and it is best to focus on those things rather than what you can not control. Here are three of them:

• Do I work harder than any other player? (Effort is entirely within your control).
• Do I know what I need to do to improve? (I might need to ask the coach this).
• Am I a good teammate? (Being nice and supportive will encourage other players to involve you and help you get better. It will definitely be noticed that you are a good ‘locker room’ person).

I was rarely penciled in as a starter when I was competing, and I spent many fruitless hours fretting about being selected. Remember that, unless your Mom or Dad is the coach, you are not in control of team selection: the coach is. You can choose to improve and get better and give the coach no choice but to select you, or you can gripe and whine and look for someone else to blame.

Sometimes, you do have to change teams to get more playing time, but that should be a second or third resort. The first is to look to work harder and get better. The second is to be patient and bide your time. You are only one tackle or one ‘flu bug away from being called on to replace the player ahead of you.

Make sure you are ready for it. And enjoy the time with your teammates while you can.

Read More:

• 20 Tips to Help Your Athlete Get Off the Bench
• How Kids Can Tell If Their Coach Cares
• How to Develop a Successful Mindset for a Youth Athlete

“How can I motivate my child to do more exercise?” Parents often ask me. “Play with them,” is my answer. This may seem simplistic, but it works. Children, up until their teenage years anyway, enjoy spending time with their parents: providing the parent is present mentally and emotionally as well as physically. Here are three tips on how to inspire your children to exercise so that they look forward to being healthy and active.

3 Tips To Inspire Your Child To Exercise

Tip 1: Switch off your smartphone.

If you are out in the yard or park with your child and dealing with work emails or sharing pictures on social media, then you are physically present but emotionally absent. Your child knows this. Fifteen minutes of quality play and attention will make the trip outside fun and rewarding; they will want to go back again.

Tip 2: Have a variety of sporting toys to play with.

The environment is crucial when encouraging children to play. It doesn’t require a lot of money either. Here are some essentials: Softballs of different shapes and sizes for smaller hands to throw and catch (rolled-up socks work too); skipping rope (one for parents too); a wheeled vehicle to help them keep up on walks (scooter, balance bike, skateboard); different bats/ racquets to help striking.

You can roll up a magazine and tape it tight, and have your child throw a screwed-up piece of paper at you. That is your indoor softball game. Their coordination needs to develop so balloons are great for them to practice (and ornament friendly).

If your child has lots of playtime with these homemade items, they develop skills that give them confidence when they are then asked to do more organized activities at school.

Children learn by watching and then doing. They will perform the activity for a short time and then want to move on to something different. This is perfectly suited for the home environment. It is less suited for an hour of adult-led coaching, especially at a young age. Fifteen minutes of play and then they can do reading, crafts or help you do the housework!

Tip 3: Train with your child rather than them training with you.

The keen endurance- sports parent can be seen taking their child for runs and bike rides. The child will comply because they want to spend time with Mum and Dad but you risk them dropping out completely as and when they get older.

Children play more like sprinters: they perform short bursts of activity and then take a rest. No child goes to the park to play with their friends and runs laps. If you devote some of your training time to playing with your child on their terms, you can develop your speed and agility with them.

Here are some ideas that could help add some freshness to your training, but more importantly, help your child develop their fitness in a way that is appropriate to their age and stage of development.

Ideas To Freshup Your Childs’ Fitness

Fetch: A good opportunity for you to combine throwing with your child. Get any throwing object like a tennis ball or frisbee and throw it as far as you can. Both of you run to the object and then the other person throws it as far as they can. Continue across the park and then return. Alternatively, one of you throw and fetch and return and then the other person takes their turn. The former is more continuous, the latter has the benefit of shortening the sprint distance for the less able thrower.

Tag: A classic, which is surprisingly hard. This is what kids live for. Have some “safe” areas but set a time limit on how long they can spend there. A smaller space means more short sprints but more agility. A larger space means longer sprints, and adults get the advantage.

Crawling: Working on the reciprocal arm and leg action, hip and shoulder strength, and coordination. You can either crawl for 5- 10 meters and then get up and run, which works on acceleration, or you can crawl in as many different ways as possible in a smaller space. For example: forwards, backward, sideways, hips up, hips down, on 1 hand/ 2legs or 2 hands/ 1 leg. You can either race or match what your child is doing.

With these three ideas in place, you will hopefully have fun, bond with your child, and inspire them to move more often.

Read More

• Why Playing Tag Is an Awesome Way for Youth Athletes to Build Speed, Agility and Awareness
• Kids Play Fewer ‘Pick-Up Games,’ And It’s Hurting Youth Sports
• Why Jim Harbaugh Believes Every American Boy Should Play Soccer

Avoiding Stress

Avoiding stress is a short-term solution that can come back and hurt you in the long run. As anyone who has avoided sorting out their tax returns or revising for an exam can tell you. It is tempting as a parent to ‘fix’ things for our child by asking the coach to select them for a tournament, changing teams, doing their maths homework for them, or building the model volcano. But, how does the child learn to cope and adapt on their own? There are times when a parent has to step in: any form of abuse is inexcusable and should be reported.

When I look back to the biggest exam of my life; I was nervous, scared even, and was worried that I was going to fail. I had been taking lessons practiced as much as I could on my own. The exam was public, and everyone could see if I made a mistake. The day came, and my Mum and Dad and an army of parents lined the street to see our cycling proficiency test: I was eight-years-old. I cycled along, and my parents smiled and waved. They came and hugged me at the end of the obstacle course, none of us knew the result then. I felt relieved and comforted. I passed. At age eight, that was the biggest test of my life so far. It didn’t make the local papers and there was no TV crew but my parents recognized that it meant a great deal to me. I appreciated their support.

If we denigrate the severity of the test: “It’s only a mock-exam”; or “it’s only a qualifying tournament,” in an effort to reduce anxiety, we risk inadvertently giving the message, “you are worrying about nothing, something is wrong with you.”

Suppose we hype the severity of the test and micromanage our child’s preparation. In that case, we might be adding to the stress rather than reducing it.

4 Ways To Help Your Athlete With Stress

1. Love them unconditionally. Win or lose, grumpy or cuddly, they are our children. If we wrap our love in rewards for “succeeding,” then we are narrowing their identity into “athlete” or “student” rather than simply our child.
2. Inform coaches and teachers of the other events happening in your child’s life. Mid-term exams might mean missing the optional training session or the four-hour road -trip for an away match. Teachers might like to know that your child was away all weekend on a camp and that their Monday-morning lethargy was not due to binge-watching TV shows.
3. Create family time or friends’ time that is out of the school/ sport dynamic. This is difficult with teenagers, hence the friends’ suggestion, but mealtimes together trips to the mall or playing frisbee in the park are all opportunities to unwind and talk about something else.
4. Practice listening. It is tempting to intercede and offer solutions to help your child or to show false empathy and relate everything back to your own experiences, but the child just wants to talk or vent their emotions. I get more information from my daughter when we unload the dishwasher in the evening together than I ever do by asking, “How was your day?” when she returns from school. The teenage child may show little love and affection, and be downright surly most of the time, but they understand and appreciate the fact that you are there. They will talk on their terms, not yours.

Stress Management Strategies To Help Your Student-Athlete Relax

• Sipping herbal tea
• Sleeping well
• Hot bubble bath
• Toga
• Listening to music
• Walking the dog

These can be introduced and demonstrated by you as and when the child is receptive. They will be ineffective if they are imposed.

The most important thing is to remember that sport is just a pastime, there to be enjoyed, and not a career path for the vast majority of children. The best athletes enjoy the process. Our job as parents is to help them on the way.

Read More

• 4 Ways to Ease Sports Parenting Stress
• 5 Ways Young Athletes Can Reduce Stress and Anxiety
• Why Coaching From the Sidelines Will Always Backfire for Sports Parents

Instead of labeling children and putting them into convenient boxes, coaches should be open-minded as to the children’s potential. If they give hope to everyone in the program, all the children work and strive to become better versions of themselves.

As Finn Gunderson told me, ‘Forget winning or losing. Aren’t we saving souls here?’

Some Common Misconceptions

The early developer who is bigger, stronger, and faster than her peers may be labeled ‘talented’ and then struggle to adapt when her peers catch up. She may not develop the work ethic necessary to succeed at anything long-term. Instead, she relies on her’ talent.’ The coach who wants to win on Friday picks the early developer because she is taller than her peers. If the coach uses the word, ‘talent,’ then other athletes believe themselves untalented. This can then result in them quitting or not trying, using phrases such as, ‘I’m no good, so what’s the point?’

The athlete labeled ‘lazy’ may quit the sport. The ‘lazy’ athlete may lack self-confidence or understanding of the sport. They may have outside pressures from home, peers, or school that affect their motivation in training and be misinterpreted as ‘lazy.’ A coach who encourages and praises this athlete helps build their confidence. Work ethic can be developed but it takes time. Structured practices that challenge the athletes’ minds, as well as their bodies, create enthusiasm. So do semi-structured practices where the athletes teach their peers or follow the guided discovery.

The Dangers Of Labelling

The thought of defining any person with one or two words is mystifying. Every human is a complex individual. We have multiple attributes that include our physical, emotional, mental, and social make-ups. Labeling can quickly degenerate into stereotyping. Coaches and teachers can preconceive what an athlete from a specific ethnic/social/economic background will be like without seeing the athlete in action. This leads to coaching that athlete in a certain way: drill-master, sycophant, disdainful (none are great).

In the UK, children are put into ‘Talented and Gifted’ streams at school as young as 8-years-old. They are labeled as such by Primary School teachers who have had four hours of Physical Education training while learning to become teachers. What is the teacher identifying? Those who can perform skills or win the running, jumping and throwing events. What happens to those children? They are asked to represent the school at inter-school competitions.

The teacher does not have to teach: they just select those that can do already. What happens to the rest of the children? Those who are not members of sports clubs, do not have parents who play ‘catch’ in the park, or are born in the last two months of the school year and are smaller than their classmates?

They get left behind and then left out.

This continues into secondary school, where children are split into two p.e. streams: able and less-able! The same selection policies occur. Half of the school intake is sidelined. Half! At 11-years old.

The school teams are selected from an ever-shallower pool of athletes. Those labeled as ‘less-able’ at 11-years-old are unlikely to rejoin the pool of habitual exercisers and sports participants unless a rounded physical education program taught them the skills and included them in games and sports with their peers.

Does any coach or teacher really want to hamper a child’s life chances by labelling them at 10 or 11-years-old?

Summary

Young athletes are human beings first, sportspeople second. The coach and teacher of the young athlete should recognize that during these formative years, children are changing rapidly. They can be brilliant in one situation and terrible in another situation the next day.

Whilst we all like winning on Saturday, being open-minded and creative as coaches allows us to see the potential in every young athlete. We can then invent and structure different types of challenges and competitions to allow every young athlete the chance to flourish and reach their potential. No matter how long that takes.

Weight training can help the players reduce the risk of non-contact injury, improve their deceleration and their acceleration. Traditional strength training often adds mass to the players’ bodies that they then have to carry around over 11 km. A balance must be found that gets the players as strong as they can, without getting too heavy, whilst being able to run well and be agile. Copying the football players’ weight training program would be unsuitable.

The Key Areas

Before lifting weights, the developing player, or novice adults, should undergo a foundational training program as outlined here:

Once this has been followed and the athlete can move well, then they can start to do more specific work with weights.

The common injury areas for field hockey players are the back, pelvis, knee and hamstrings. A combination of body weight and weight training exercises can be used to help reduce these injuries.

Hip series 1

Hip series 2:

Hip series 3

Hip hinge

Bent over row

Single-leg Squats

Hop and Hold

You will notice that most of these exercises combine balance, control and mobility. The exception is back strength. That is because the muscles do not require strength in isolation: they have to be able to support the body in the various different hockey positions and at speed. This requires balance and control and mobility.

The bent-over row and hip hinge can be done with either barbell or dumbbells, whichever is convenient. A starting place of 3 sets of 5-8 repetitions is enough for the weights exercises, 5 is enough for the body weight. Pull-ups are harder and the athlete may need to start with a jump pull-up and then lower slowly until they are strong enough to pull themselves up unaided.

The two sequences of exercises above can be done before or after a running session or hockey practice. They could also be done before a more generic weight training session.

These exercises are examples of what can be done and other, similar exercises, can be introduced throughout the season to add variety and stimuli.

Additional Exercises

Once the key areas have been trained regularly, additional can be introduced to further develop the athletes’ performance.

Lunge and Press: this can be done pitch side with a water bottle or in the gym with a light dumbbell. It replicates the different planes of movement that the hockey players need to get into. See the video for sets/ reps.

Back Squat: to help the athletes with acceleration from a low position. A full range of movement with control should always be the priority. 2 sets of 8-10 repetitions to start and then build to 3 sets of 5-6 reps with a heavier load. Squats are a great way of adding unnecessary mass. They are a staple for bodybuilders, so limit the weight used. Remember how much running is required in hockey.

Squat Jumps: use dumbbells in each hand. This can be done in between sets of back squat or afterwards. Jump as high as you can and land quietly with ankles, knees, and hips bent. This helps with braking mechanics that help you to stop fast and safely. 2-3 sets of 4-5 repetitions, ensuring correct landing and height, is a good start. If you can barely get off the ground, lower the weight.

Summary

Hockey, like all sports, requires its players to be strong. However, they also have to be good at running and sprinting and fast enough to make plays at the end of the match. Weight training should supplement the hockey practice and running sessions. The aim is not to be ‘strong in the gym’ but ‘strong enough’.

The sleep deprivation of the high school athlete may be due to several reasons:

• Late-night practices
• Homework
• Part-time job/ caring
• Online gaming
• Incessant ‘notifications’ on various devices and the need to respond.

or, more likely, a combination of all of them.

This, combined with a sub-optimal diet, means that the sleep is not only short but fitful. The alarm clock goes, the snooze button is tapped and tapped, the parent shouts, and shouts and the search for caffeine and/ or sugar to kick start the day begins.

Why do we need sleep?

This might seem like a daft question but in an age of macho-work ethic stories where business people and politicians compete to show how much work they can do in a day, the necessity for sleep is sometimes overlooked. Sleep is essential for mental restoration. Whilst the body can cope with less sleep in the short term the mind suffers. You may know this when you try to exercise after a bad night’s sleep: you dread the thought of it, struggle to lace up your shoes, but five minutes into practice you feel okay. Your decision-making might be sluggish but your body is moving fine.

This is only a short-term solution. Repeating this endeavor is likely to increase your risk of injury: especially in fast-moving, collision sports like football or high-skill/high-risk sports such as gymnastics. You need 100% of your brain capacity to perform effectively and safely.

Your body also needs sleep in order to repair and restore from its exertions. As athletes train harder than normal people and put their bodies under stressful loads, their need for sleep is potentially higher than normal.

Naps are one solution.

One way to increase the amount of sleep is to have a nap, or multiple naps, during the day. It is better to plan a nap and be fresh for your class, practice or match than to be tired and groggy and doze off in the middle of class or just before kick-off.

The early afternoon or early-evening slump is a natural part of our day. Unfortunately, work and school interfere with our natural tendency to nap. But, a 15-minute nap will improve your mood, cognitive ability and even cardiovascular health (as shown in one study on Greek men who removed their afternoon siesta.

A short sleep will leave you refreshed. So will a longer sleep of about 90-minutes. Anywhere between 20-60 minutes may leave you groggy, this is known as ‘sleep inertia’. It becomes even harder to get going after this longer, but not long enough, nap.

Of course, the problem with high school athletes napping is that they are at high school! It is unlikely that they have quiet rooms or sleep pods available for naps like Californian tech firms. The nap might have to take place in the bus or car on the way home or leave it until they are home and before they go on to practice.

To avoid sleeping too long, either set the alarm for twenty minutes or drink tea or coffee before your nap. There is a twenty-minute lag between caffeine ingestion and its effects that is useful for nap-timing.

Summary

Sleep is essential for everyone. It is especially important for high school athletes who are growing, learning, and competing. If they are unable or unwilling, to improve their nighttime sleep habits, then encouraging and facilitating planned naps will help them deal with the stress of their young lives.

Read More

• How Sleep Improves Athletic Performance
• Sleeping Tips for Youth Athletes
• How You Sleep, Eat and Hydrate Matters More Than Any Other Recovery Technique

This was independent of aerobic type exercising, which has additional benefits.

Whilst winning medals or looking good might be reasons for exercising that we can do without, the chance to reduce disease is something that everyone can benefit from.

Resistance training has been recommended by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) for some time but mainly due to the musculoskeletal benefits: bone mineral density, muscle function and range, brain health, blood glucose regulation, and obesity control. The evidence showing other health benefits means that resistance training is indisputably essential for all adults (and children, but they are not the subject of this article).

You do not have to go to the gym to train your muscles (although you can if you like). Here are some ideas on scheduling resistance training in your everyday life and feel the benefits.

Train regularly

The study quoted only looked at weight training and calisthenics and their health outcomes. It did not include research on activities such as gardening or carrying heavy loads that require strength. So, while these are worthwhile activities, we can not assume that they have the same benefits as a scheduled, planned programme of resistance training. They might, but we don’t know it yet.

Resistance training means working against gravity: you can either lift an external weight such as a dumbbell or a water bottle, or you can move your own body like a push-up or pull up. Whatever you do must require effort. If it is easy, then it won’t be helping you! Consistency of training is essential: the study showed big health improvements as time training increased from 30-60 minutes but not as big improvements after that. So an hour a week is better than half an hour a week. It does not matter how you split that time up. You could do 10 minutes a day for six days a week or an hour every Saturday, it doesn’t matter.

The most important thing is that it fits your schedule.

What should I do?

It depends on where you are and what your experience is. If you are a beginner, I would recommend splitting up into smaller sessions if you can to allow yourself time to recover. An hour of training might be too much to start.

Simple is good. Bodyweight exercises are best to start with and then you can add external resistance when you can move well and with control. Exercises that require movement and coordination between the muscles have a greater transfer to everyday living: they also burn

Ideas About The Squat

This could be one of your 6 mini-workouts.

Connecting your upper body with your lower body is important. This sequence shows how this can be done:

and these are slightly harder:

Upper body strength is important but pull-ups and press-ups are hard to do. One way to develop grip strength and improve your posture is to hang from a bar or rafter, here are some ideas that are fun (start with the simple hanging):

and for press up progressions here:

Finally, if you want to add resistance you can start with a couple of water bottles before progressing to dumbbells. A water bottle in each hand allows you to do lots of different exercises. If you look in this video, you can see how the dumbbells are used safely:

For the health gains mentioned in the study, it doesn’t matter what you are doing, as long as you are doing something. We all have favorite types of exercises and those that are most convenient. Do that if you like bodyweight, dumbbell, barbell, or kettlebell. Or, mix and match to have fun.

Do what you can keep doing for the rest of your life and make it part of your fun weekly routine rather than a chore to overcome.

Exercise increases your core body temperature and stimulates the cooling system through respiration and sweating, giving athletes the impression that they don’t need to cover up. The adage, ‘Dress for the second mile’ is good advice in normal conditions. Your body will warm up during the first mile of your run, and you don’t want to be wearing too many clothes that you regret for the rest of your run.

Outdoor Athletes

Team sport athletes can take off or put layers on the sidelines before the match starts or during intervals; they can adjust as necessary. But the runners, cyclists, hikers, and skiers have to be prepared for the duration of their training session or competition.

A common misconception is that most of the body’s heat is lost through the head. This is incorrect: heat is lost everywhere. The body loses heat by circulating blood to the skin and by sweating. Convection is the process of heat loss where hot air rises from the skin’s surface and is replaced by cooler air that sinks. The evaporation of moisture from the skin also cools the blood that then circulates back through the body. If an athlete exercises naked, heat will be lost equally across their whole body, with hairy parts that add natural insulation. The head accounts for about 10% of the surface area of humans and about 10% of the total heat loss.

The misconception about heat loss from the head came from one study on US Military aircrew in the 1950s. The researchers studied Arctic survival strategies and put the aircrew through tests without headgear. Unsurprisingly, the poor subjects lost most of their heat through their exposed heads. Everything else was wrapped up. A better-designed study (for the researchers at least) would have compared heat loss without trousers or jackets or boots or gloves to that when hatless. We can only surmise that this wasn’t done due to the reasonable objections of the otherwise obedient aircrew: they knew the risks.

The Two Main Risks In Winter

There are two main risks when exercising outdoors in winter (apart from slips, trips, and falls):

1. Frostbite: an injury to the skin caused by freezing. It occurs in exposed areas. The risk of frostbite is only 5% when the temperature is above 5F (-15C). But at 0F (-18C), frostbite can occur within 30 minutes.
2. Hypothermia: a drop in the body’s core temperature that results in peripheral systems shutting down to protect the core organs. Fatigue, shivering, slurring of speech, and lack of coordination are symptoms.

Both occur when the temperature drops and either the wind picks up, or it rains. Thermoregulation is affected by the weather. The cold air that touches the skin can both damage it and increase the rate of heat loss. So while 0F is a very low temperature, a cold wind creates a wind chill that makes an average cold day dangerous.

Wet weather that soaks the athlete cools them from the outside faster than they can warm up from the inside. This also occurs when wearing too many layers that trap moisture that cool and chills the body. This is a dangerous tipping point. The athlete can work harder to warm up, but this wastes energy, and the body starts to shut down.

Layer Up

The best way to reduce risk is to wear suitable clothing and check the weather forecast. Wearing thin layers that can easily be removed when you warm-up is essential. To prevent frostbite areas such as the nose, ears and fingers should be covered on cold days. You can wear thin, insulating gloves and a thicker pair of mittens on top that can be removed when you get warm to protect your hands.

1. The layer closest to the skin should be porous, allowing moisture to be drawn away. Cotton layers are unsuitable because they trap moisture.
2. The second layer should be a thin fleece or wool insulating material.
3. The top layer should be a waterproof, breathable material protecting from wind and rain.

If the weather looks severe, find an alternative way of exercising that day: it is better to be safe and come back tomorrow.

Youth athletes need to move well, often move, and incorporate a large variety of exercises and movements to increase their skill set, minimize boredom and reduce the risk of injury.

Instead of how much, think of how well.

Adults love metrics, ‘How far did you run today?’ ‘How much can you bench?’ Applying numbers to youth athletes immediately limits what they will do.

Instead of a number, encourage the athlete to move well.

Then repeat that movement.

Then do that movement faster or make it more difficult.

Repeat with a different movement.

The accumulation of quality movements increases the athletes’ strength, endurance and confidence. They get fit without having to ‘embrace the grind’.

Here is an example of a training program for one day with that in mind.

Warming Up:

Either

Jump rope: This can be done on the spot or with a running action. Start with simple revolutions and build up the numbers until you can do sets of 100 or for 1 minute, then add different moves and tricks for variety.

or

Grid moves: Place four cones or markers to make a 5 meter by 5-meter square. Start at cone 1, do side skips, side shuffles, or side crawls to cone 2, then run or skip across the diagonal to cone four and repeat the side movement on the opposite side of the grid to cone three and then run or skip across the diagonal until you are back at cone 1.

Using small squares limits how fast you can move and prevents overdoing one movement. Go round twice doing one set of exercises, rest, and then try different moves for another set.

Get offs: Speed and acceleration are important in almost every sport. It is easy to run the speed out of athletes by doing too much steady-state work. Instead, work on accelerating fast from different positions and slowly walk back to recover.

1. From a 3 point stance, burst for two strides and gradually decelerate. Three on each side.
2. From a crouch, start sprint for 10-15 meters. 4 times.
3. Fast skips for 10 meters, sprint for 20 meters. Four times. This requires coordination to transition from light, quick feet to driving hard into the ground for the sprint.

Squat mobility routine: Squats are a staple of athletic training. This sequence helps develop the mobility of the ankles and hips; It is important to develop and maintain a full range of movement rather than load a limited range with barbells and dumbbells.

Hand balances: 5 minutes A great way to build core, wrist, elbow and shoulder strength. Youth athletes need to build bone strength and loading the upper body through hand-balances is a fun way of achieving this. Start from the ground up to minimize the injury risk.

Rolling: 5 minutes of rolling helps mobilize the back and counteract the stiffness and slumped postures created by too much screen and desk time. It doesn’t have to be technically perfect, as seen in this video. A soft mat helps enough space so that you don’t knock over any furniture.

Summary

By no means is this a comprehensive program, but it does show a framework of exercises that help develop strength, mobility, speed, agility, and balance. Replacing the exercises above with variations every few workouts will ensure that the youth athlete is constantly stimulated but not overwhelmed. Training frequency will build their foundation as effectively as adding more repetitions to each workout.

The idea of accumulating fitness and skills over time is similar. In the age of social media, it is easy to become disheartened by the heroic workouts that some athletes and coaches post.

It is so daunting that beginners simply don’t know where to start. If they don’t have time for the two-hour workout, they think, ‘Why bother?’

However, five minutes a day adds up to 30 hours a year. Who can’t get better after 30 hours of practice? After 10 years that is 300 hours.

This article will show the value of investing five minutes of your time every day so that you can enjoy the long-term rewards.

Where To Start?

Think of a number between 1 and 10. Do that many bodyweight squats. There, you have made a start. Well done. It is as simple as that.

No, you haven’t won the Olympics, scored a touchdown or ‘deserve’ a treat but you have done something. That is more than most people do and you should recognize it as such. Excuses are common:

• Not enough time
• Not enough energy
• Nowhere to train
• Joining a gym is expensive
• I don’t know where to start

You have just annihilated all of those excuses by doing those bodyweight squats.

The secret to success is to do the same thing tomorrow and the day after that. If you did six squats today and set that as your target, then you will have done 2190 squats over the next year.

2190 squats! Imagine that. Think of how your legs will be stronger and more flexible.

Can you see how simple it is?

The sports and fitness industry is worth billions of dollars in the USA alone. The buzz and noise about exercise programming is often accompanied by the need to buy something or pay someone to do it for you. The more complicated the process, the more you have to payout.

By keeping things simple, you gain control and the chance of consistency. Consistency is how top athletes beat the also-rans. Consistency of training, of sleep, of diet and of routines.

What Is The Next Step?

Pick another number between 1 and 10. Now jump in the air and land quietly that number of times. Well done.

Did you know that teenage girls can improve their bone mineral density by doing only 6 vertical jumps every day? This is important as strong bones are less likely to get fractured, and this lasts into menopause when the risk of osteoporosis increases. So the squats and jumps that you did today will help reduce the risk of osteoporosis in your 40s and 50s if you keep doing them. That is the power of accumulation.

But how many teenage girls do any jumps, let alone 6 a day?

This is why consistency is important.

So far, we only have two exercises that take less than 30 seconds to complete: 10% of your five-minute workout time. If you added press-ups, lunges, back extensions, v-sits, jumping jacks, and lifting a chair above your head in the same way you did the squats and jumps, you have an easy routine to follow. This is something that can be done anywhere, anytime (providing you have access to a chair).

The accumulation looks like this (taking six as your number).

10 exercises x 6 repetitions x 365 days x 10 years= 219,000 movements.

219,000!

Compare this to those people who do nothing not to the Olympians. Think how much better your body and mind will feel after 219,000 movements compared to scrolling on your phone.

Habit-Forming Is Key

You might be thinking, ‘but that’s not enough.’

You might be right. But it is better than nothing. By focusing on the simple five minutes, you start to achieve your goals rather than fail at them. This gives you a foundation for future success. Having got into the exercise habit, you can then start to find additional five-minute segments throughout the week.

You can do similar routines every day, or alternate them throughout the week. I gave you some suggestions to get you started. Other things work well:

• Rope skipping
• Yoga type stretch routines such as downward dog to up dog.
• Dumbbell exercises that use the whole body.
• Running half a mile.

The principles are the same. There is no need to go for the heroic efforts that are mentally and physically exhausting, (unless you want to and are capable of them), just build in small routines that you can maintain.

It won’t be glamorous or gain you, followers, on social media, but it will build up a bank of good health.