Diversify sport as a child
Parents come to me and ask the magical question what sports should their young child play? The simple answer to this is “everything”. While they are still young, their neurons are at their highest awareness to learn and acquire new skills.
However, the problem is that the brain has not fully developed, so the amount of information a child can be fed at one time is less than a fully grown adult listening, acquiring, learning, and processing information.
Therefore, it is critically essential to make sure while your child has an untainted pattern of execution, you give them the best coaches who specialise in teaching skills and techniques.
Play and games at a young age are essential, it helps with engagement, but the difference between an ordinary coach and a professionally trained coach is that they teach skill first and then create games to disguise the reinforcement of patterns the child just learnt.
The secret lies in the old saying “Teach a young man to fish, and they will grow up knowing how to provide”.
Scold a young man with instructors every time he tries to fish: he will grow up not thinking for himself and seeking validation and recognition for every action.
Talent identification does have its places in guiding your child to the right sport that his body may be built for.
The two extreme examples I can share that explain my point is a young child who comes from a prosperous family of Ethiopian marathon runners versus a young child from a successful line of Springbok rugby players.
Both children are not guaranteed to become champions, so how do you determine which sports they should play growing up?
If both specialise from a young age, according to research, they both may have a high degree life-changing injury.
As they are growing up, they are over-developing specific muscle groups and overloading others, which causes a host of imbalance and energy leaks.
Proper development of young athletes starts by finding a sport they love and teaching them skills and techniques to interact within the game to a high degree of proficiency from a physiological point of view and a sports-specific skills point of view.
In a sport like rugby, it is the ability to run, sprint, jump, land, cut and pass, tackle, fall, or scrum.
If we had to take marathon running, for example, it has its set-up requirement of learning to run properly on the balls of your feet, correct posture, stride length, the rhythm of the arms and relaxed, good running posture.
The art of competing in a race is the second part of the skill needed for that sport.
If a young athlete only learns to run forward and never learns agility, then the minute they switch over to another multi-directional sport, they place themselves at a high degree of risk of injury because they have spent years specialising in only running forward.
Point in case – this is precisely what would happen if a South African record-holder sprinter decided to play some touch rugby with his mates.
He applied the same power, torque, and explosiveness for a side-step movement for a person who has built his muscles for straight lines, and then injured himself.
I see it all day, every day, when we assess sprinters at my practice.
Their straight-line speed is good, but the minute you perform any agility assessment, it is horrible.
This is also why they can’t get faster and are riddled with injuries.
The body is about balance, and if they just knew to add in a little bit of cross-training and agility work to their training, they would run faster and have fewer injuries.
A tall building is built to be tall and strong but let’s not forget, it needs a solid foundation and supporting columns to make sure the building stays upright.
Young athletes need to see youth development as building the foundational phase of their sporting career by learning the techniques of how to use their bodies in relation to the sport, the methods of the sport and then how to play the sport, positional requirement, and the dynamics of how to play with others.
The next level of development is the sports performance development requirements.
There is a big difference in the needs of future strength development of a marathon runner and Springbok.
Size and big muscles are not your friends running long distance, but it is when you play rugby.
Both sports require you to be strong, but they are different types of strength.
The take-home message here is – , don’t specialise from a young age.
Play a multitude of sports that will complement your primary sport and learn skills from other sports that you can transfer into your primary sport of choice.
As you get older and reach the age of 13, you can start your specialisation journey in your sport, provided you have a balanced, well-rounded sports science development program.