School has only been out for a few weeks, but the off season is a time when many young athletes look to build muscle and strengthen their skills. Derek Ferley, PhD, is the Director of Sports Science and Research at the Avera Human Performance Center and he oversees Avera’s youth training programs. Making him the perfect person to helps answer the pertinent questions regarding athletic training and sports performance programs.
When is it OK for kids to start sports performance training?
“With respect to when a proper sports training should start, I think somewhere around that 12- to 13-year-old range is a good place to start when they first kind of go through that initial growth spurt. But having said that, I think kids even younger can do things that are really more learning how to hit or swing or throw, you know, those things that are a little bit more sport specific in nature, I think are fine to start at even a younger age than say 11 or 12,” said Ferley.
Is weight training or acceleration training OK for young kids?
“Even something like strength training, you can have younger kids do that as long as it's an age appropriate program and they've got age appropriate exercises and then they've got somebody who's monitoring them from start to finish. And as long as you're checking those boxes, you can start something like strength training at a fairly young age. But then agility training and some other conditioning, most of that is part and parcel of whatever sport they're playing. So if they're playing a sport at 7 or 8, you can probably do some training at that age because you're just trying to replicate those types of things that they're doing in their actual sport,” said Ferley.
Do kids and parents need to set reasonable expectations for training?
“Parents, shouldn't necessarily look at these sorts of programs as programs that are going to automatically place your child on the top team or take them to the next level. I think in doing so, your expectations therefore might not be met. However, I do think it's really important to get involved with a program that has both pre and post testing so that you can see how much your kids have improved over the course of their training in some of those basic measures and metrics that are really important and are involved in most sports. So things like agility, things like speed, some power or some vertical jump training, those types of pre and post-test measures are good baseline measurements of where they are in reference to the sport as well as their competitors,” said Ferley.
When should young athletes start training for their sport?
“We're trying to always be about eight to 10 weeks ahead of whatever season is coming up. So right now, it's the middle of summer. Football and volleyball are on the horizon. So those are the athletes we have in training right now. Come winter time in November, December, that's when we'll get the spring sport athletes starting to train for say track and field or soccer, softball, baseball, whatever the case might be,” said Ferley.
Learn more about sports performance training and other programs at the Avera Human Performance Center.
