Training The High School Athlete?

High School athletes are oh, so intriging. When a 14 year old enters high school he or she is at the prime of their training pyramind. Now is the time to train and get the most out of a young developing body, and if one has progressed training properly the key ingredients are explosion and speed.

Now I am not going to talk about what exercises or percentages or whether you need to train a certain method. Save it for another blog. What I do know is the key ingredients to determine an athlete most important needs.

If you have followed my last two blogs you have noticed they all fit together since training is like a puzzle. It has specific ingredients to assist young athlete development. As a strength coach we do our job and develop coordination and agility during the early years, we do not see weaknesses later. The middle years are more for general strength and teaching instruction to foster good work habits.

The high schools years are about maximal strength, speed, explosion development. Training is like a pyramind if your foundation is good it makes everything else easy. So by now we should have good relative body strength, flexibility, coordination and agility. Now we fine tune these skills into a highly explosive athlete who has the components to excel.

What do I mean by excel? Maximal strength makes it easier to decelerate or cut and go into a faster move more posture correct body position to explode and beat someone in your first step. Correct posture goes a long ways in making an explosive athlete. I will get into explosive details in my next blog.

So it is simple build the pyramid of training from the ground up focus on mobiilty, flexibility, coordination and agility. If a high school athlete is weak in any one of these areas the weakness must be corrected before optimal performance can be reach the peak.

The second teir is quickness, general and maximal strength, body posture or for modern training terms CORE TRAINING.

Finally, If these weaknesses are corrected the athlete then has the opportunity to reach maximal speed and explosion, otherwise a weakness will limit their performance.

If you have any question or comment to any of these blogs, send me a reply I love feedback.

Train hard,

Todd Baden, MS, C.S.C.S.
Synergy Sports and Performance
3350 N. Holand-Sylvania Rd.
Toledo, Ohio 43615
419-724-4140