Is your athlete proficient in their ABC's?

As young athletes, school takes up a huge part of their lives and it should take priority.  It's so important that kids focus on being good in school, but for our focus of this article, I'm referring to the ABC's of athletics.  Is your young athlete proficient in Agility, Balance, Coordination, and Speed?  These are the components that create a solid base of athleticism.  It's so important that young athletes get introduced to a wide variety of movements, both in general movement patterns and in sport skills.  Movement stimulates brain development!  Let's dig in a bit more to explain this.

Gross motor skills and fundamental movement patterns have to be learned before fine motor skills and sport specific skills can be truly comprehended by the body.  That's not to say you cannot teach your kid sport specific movements if they don't know other basic skills.  It just means that if their body cannot understand fundamental movements, they will never truly excel in sport specific patterns.  It's becoming a trend now to become the best at one sport as soon as you can and forcing kids to learn and perfect a single sport's skill and ignoring many other vital skills needed in the big picture of athleticism.  The topic of early specialization is another talk all together and I will follow up this article with more details on that.  Right now, let's focus on the best way to accomplish physical literacy.  What is physical literacy?  This means being incredible in both movement and sport- this is the ideal goal every coach should have for their kids.

So what are fundamental movement skills?
(Side note:  This is what TNT's program is focused on!)

• Locomotion - run, skip, hop, jump, gallop, shuffle, crawl
• Stability- agility, balance, coordination, speed, and posture
• Object Manipulation- throw, catch, hit, dribble, kick, roll

What are fundamental sport skills?

This does not mean early specialization.  This means playing lots of sports.  Learning the many different skills needed and the different demands each sports has on the body.  Some sports require more running and endurance while others more skill and body control.  Basketball and soccer both require an athlete to be strong in running skills, but one requires fine motor control of the upper body while the other is lower body.  Baseball and golf do not involve much running (none in golf if you respect the course), but have a very high attention to total body coordination and control.

When a young athlete can practice on the fundamental movement skills and have a wide variety of sports skills, this will most definitely make them excel in physical literacy.  This will enhance their proficiency in the ability to master their athletic ABC's!

Resource:  Information for this blog was taken from a talk by Dr. Greg Rose (co-founder of Titlist Performance Institute) during the FMS 2014 summit series talk on "Movement Screening for Juniors"