If you had your hand on the brakes and you were trying to cycle faster...would you pedal harder or take your hands off the brakes?”

Often times we try to apply a model that has been designed for developing speed in highly tuned professional athletes (with well-developed movement skills!) and apply it to kids who cannot efficiently perform movement tasks that resemble tenants of sprinting.

Whether we are talking crossing the finish line for the marathon, getting to the ball first, or landing a punch quicker than your opponent…there isn’t a sport where being faster doesn’t provide some form of advantage.

Speed is defined as the rate of performance of an activity, and in today’s blog you will learn the often overlooked role that maturation plays in speed development for the youth athlete.

The reason why we need to understand the science behind why, how (or even if) certain mobility modalities can reduce our injury risk and enhance athletic performance, is because it takes us away from a grenade approach of “10 best stretches for” (insert muscle group), to a sniper approach of why I am using this mobility method, to address this type of restriction, in this particular athlete, in this specific way?

When mobility is lacking in one area, this may negatively impact upon joints either above or below.

Although the causes of injuries can be multifaceted, often when I’ve screened youth athletes following an injury, a mobility deficit in one area tends to coincide with an injury to an area above or below said mobility deficit.

My previous blogs in this plyometric series advocated the importance of beginning plyometric training by learning to land and develop a basic sense of rhythm and timing.

By the end of today’s blog, you will understand the 4 phases to the plyometric pyramid, what plyometrics should look like at the various ages and stages of a youth athlete’s journey, and what this journey looks like from a young child all the way up to the elite athlete.

Without an understanding of how to quantify the intensity of our plyometric training, we risk succumbing to survivorship bias; conveniently ignoring athletes who got injured in a process of mixing highly stressful plyometrics in high volumes, whilst citing those athletes who have not yet been broken as a hallmark of the training program’s success.

Athletes who produce more force, in less time, with these rebound type exercises tend to sprint faster, jump higher, and punch harder than their opponents.

Perhaps more importantly for a child, however, learning to hop, skip and jump, and stringing this together with an element of rhythm (aka rebounding) improves a child’s understanding of where their body is in time and space.

Social media is flooded with elite athletes demonstrating extraordinary feats of jumping and plyometric athleticism. Yet there is a huge difference between the type of work it takes to develop a physical quality, and what you see on social media when that physical quality is demonstrated. In today’s blog, I am going to discuss the missing gaps in these programs which we often don’t see on social media.

Think how easy it is to cave on your pledge to eat less refined sugar when someone from work brings in cakes to the office…vs if you physically have to get in your car and drive to the shops to purchase the same sugary snack.

Likewise, if your child has to turn the gym upside down and waste 5 minutes trying to find the foam roller how likely do you think they are to persist in the habit of regular foam rolling?