Stop Treating Athletic Development Like Extra Credit

The baseball player hits, throws and fields. The soccer player passes, receives and competes. The basketball player shoots, defends and plays.

Nobody questions whether athletes should practice their sport.

But we treat athletic development very differently.

Strength gets squeezed in when there's time.

Speed gets added to conditioning.

Movement preparation gets turned into five minutes of jogging and stretching.

Recovery becomes something athletes are told to do at home.

Then everyone wonders why athletes aren’t getting faster, stronger or more durable.

Athletic development should not be extra credit.

It is part of developing the athlete.

Sport Skill Is Only One Part of the Athlete

A coach can improve a player’s swing without making the athlete faster.

A soccer player can become technically better while remaining weak.

A basketball player can become a better shooter without becoming more powerful.

Sport practice and physical development overlap, but they are not the same thing.

This is one of the biggest mistakes in youth sports.

We assume playing more of a sport automatically creates a better athlete.

Sometimes it creates a more skilled athlete.

Sometimes it simply creates a tired athlete.

An athlete needs sport practice.

The athlete also needs exposure to sprinting, jumping, landing, strength, power, movement quality, conditioning and recovery.

The important word is exposure.

Nobody needs a three-hour performance workout.

Most athletes probably need small, consistent doses delivered well.

Start With Speed

If I were building an athletic development program from scratch, speed would be near the top of the list.

Why?

Because athletes need opportunities to run fast.

That sounds ridiculously simple.

It is.

Yet many team-sport athletes rarely sprint at maximum or near-maximum intent outside competition.

They run plays.

They run conditioning.

They run laps.

They do agility drills.

Those aren't necessarily the same thing as sprinting.

If we want athletes to become faster, we need to give them opportunities to actually practice speed.

That also means enough recovery between attempts.

Speed work should look almost boring.

Sprint.

Recover.

Sprint again.

Measure when possible.

When the quality drops, stop.

More isn't automatically better in athletic development. One of the recurring themes in Boyle’s work is that training is a stimulus followed by recovery, and that chasing volume can work against the result we are trying to create.

That idea matters especially with young athletes.

They don’t need to be crushed.

They need to improve.

Strength Is a Skill

Young athletes don't need complicated lifting programs.

They need coaching.

Teach them how to squat.

Teach them how to hinge.

Teach them how to push.

Teach them how to pull.

Teach them how to stabilize.

Teach them how to move on one leg.

Then gradually make those movements stronger.

The worst thing we can do is confuse weight on the bar with athlete development.

More weight is useful when the athlete can control it.

It becomes much less useful when the athlete is compensating, shortening ranges of motion and competing with teammates over numbers.

We want stronger athletes.

We also want athletes who can use that strength.

Power Connects the Weight Room to Sport

Strength gives us a larger engine.

Power helps us use it quickly.

That’s why jumps, throws and explosive movements belong in athlete development.

Again, this doesn’t need to become complicated.

Jump and land.

Throw medicine balls.

Sprint.

Use appropriate explosive lifts when athletes have the training age and coaching to perform them.

Athletes should learn how to produce force and absorb force.

Those abilities show up everywhere in sport.

The athlete accelerates.

The athlete decelerates.

The athlete jumps.

The athlete lands.

The athlete changes direction.

The athlete throws.

The athlete swings.

Athletic development should prepare the body for those demands rather than simply trying to make athletes tired.

Conditioning Is Not Punishment

This may be one of the biggest cultural mistakes in sports.

An athlete misses a ground ball.

Run.

The team loses.

Run.

Someone is late.

Run.

Now running has become punishment instead of preparation.

Conditioning should prepare athletes for their sport.

That means understanding the energy demands of competition and designing work accordingly.

It also means realizing that practice itself contains conditioning.

A soccer player may already be accumulating enormous running volume.

A basketball player in a two-hour practice is not lacking activity.

A baseball player has a different conditioning requirement altogether.

We need to fill what the athlete is missing, not simply add more work because more work feels tough.

Movement Preparation Is Training

Warm-ups are usually the first thing cut when teams get behind schedule.

That tells athletes exactly how important we think preparation is.

Five minutes becomes three.

Three becomes jogging to the foul pole.

Then someone pulls a hamstring.

A good preparation period can accomplish a lot.

We can address mobility.

We can reinforce movement patterns.

We can introduce low-level plyometrics.

We can perform arm care.

We can prepare athletes neurologically for sprinting and explosive work.

We can teach.

What coaches call the warm-up can actually be one of the highest-value fifteen minutes of the session.

Treat it that way.

Measure What Matters

Young athletes love feedback.

Use it.

Time sprints.

Measure jumps.

Track primary lifts.

Compare athletes primarily against themselves.

This changes training.

“Run fast” is an instruction.

“You ran 1.62 last week and 1.58 today” is feedback.

Now the athlete knows.

The coach knows.

The program has evidence.

I like improvement as the scoreboard because it creates a different culture.

The strongest athlete in the room may have started strong.

The athlete who moves from a 20-inch vertical to 24 inches accomplished something.

Reward progress.

That lesson is particularly useful for developmental athletes.

The Goal Is Not to Create Weightlifters

This is where coaches sometimes lose perspective.

We are not training athletes so they can become good at training.

We are training them so training can help them become better athletes.

The weight room is not the sport.

The sprint timer is not the sport.

The vertical jump mat is not the sport.

They are tools.

This distinction keeps program design remarkably simple.

Ask what the sport requires.

Ask what the athlete lacks.

Train the gap.

Then return the athlete to the sport better prepared than before.

Make It Part of the Day

The biggest breakthrough may not be a new exercise.

It may be integration.

Imagine athletes arriving fifteen minutes before practice and completing their preparation and prehab work.

Then speed and power happen before sport practice while athletes are fresh.

Strength work is integrated into the appropriate part of the schedule.

Recovery is planned instead of discussed.

Now athletic development isn't another appointment.

It is simply part of being an athlete.

That is the goal.

Not a better workout.

A better development system.