Athlete Methodology
Introduction
Our lives have significant stages of development that transition us from children to adults and training programs should be based on a participant’s specific development phases and capabilities. Methodologies help organizations align activities, programs, and competitions to best utilize sensitive periods of accelerated adaptation, especially in pre-puberty, puberty, and early post-puberty.
The purpose of this information is to detail a consistent and cohesive methodology for young athletic development. While pieces of this methodology may be futsal specific due to futsal being an integral sport of our academy, there is a significant amount of information that can be applied cross-sport. It will explain the reasons why it’s viable and it will detail necessary science behind it.
Methodologies are an ever-adjusting tool that new experiences will refine through time. While maintaining a consistent club methodology is important, so is making necessary adjustments as new discoveries are made and results are examined.
The House
The best explanation of how a methodology works is using the construction of a house. Houses are built in a certain order based on need and accessibility. Doing things in the correct order allows for the most optimal construction with the least amount of work. A house can be built in many different orders, and it can be a beautiful house afterward, but if it isn’t done in a practical order it takes a lot more work and time. A building schedule tells each specialist when to arrive and apply their craft, and if everything is followed correctly, a livable house will be built by the end. Sports methodologies work in a similar way: they align training programs to development phases and capabilities in the most optimal way with the goal being to make a complete player by the end. Where clubs and parents often fail is when they want their players to be complete too soon. They start bringing in furniture and beds (competition expectations) before the house is complete, and construction (development) has to occur in a cluttered environment (environment of mixed expectations).
Different stages of athletic development cater to the building of different skills. In a house, installing plumbing and electrical needs to occur after framing, but before sheetrocking. Doing either of these too early is nearly impossible, yet waiting until after sheetrocking would be a terrible mess; their addition has a precise window. Similarly, certain skills are best learned at certain developmental stages. Trying to implement them too soon will confuse and frustrate players, yet delaying their progress, or worse, skipping them in favor of introducing something more advanced, may significantly delay the player’s overall development. This may result in an athlete being successful early, but unable to achieve the long-term success they may have otherwise had. For these reasons, methodologies are important for creating and organizing a long-term pathway for player development.
General Planning
There are three main categories that abilities fall in: General Physical, General Mental, and Sport Specific. As one can assume, the two general categories are more important to develop at younger ages as they directly contribute to a player’s ability to develop the Sport Specific category. Each of these categories are broken into several groups as detailed to the right.
Order of Operations
Referring back to our house analogy, there is a specific order of development regardless of age. Each piece builds on the one below it. We always need the foundation (motor skills) before framing (coordinations) and framing is what all the walls and floors (technical skills) are built on. No matter how well you design your walls, a poor foundation and framing will always affect the integrity of the whole thing. This is why multi-sport athletes are so successful: each sport develops motor-skills and coordinations differently which builds a much stronger base and allows sport-specific skills to be more easily learned and more quickly refined.
General Mental
It’s very easy to overlook mental skills at the younger ages. Physical skills are very easy to see and it’s not difficult to overlook the mental part of the game for the glory of an athletic and goal-scoring young player. However, as they age, the importance of having these mental skills becomes more pronounced. One could argue that at the top level, it’s one of the greatest factors that differentiates players from each other - due to most of the top players being able to accomplish most technical feats without much issue. As with any skill, the younger you can instill players with good habits the more likely they are to adopt them, keep them, and refine them. Unfortunately, many organizations aren’t aware of how to teach mental skills.
The General Mental Category features mental skills in three different groups:
Level 1: Basic skills || Level 2: Preparatory skills || Level 3: Performance skills.
Applying Age and Sensitive Periods
Sensitive phases of time are broad windows of time in which an athlete is more sensitive to a certain type of training. Physiological systems of an athlete can be trained at all ages, however, trainability during these windows of accelerated adaptation are when young athletes are especially responsive. Up until puberty begins, most athletes share similar timing in their sensitive periods, however, the onset of puberty will determine the timing of sensitive periods going forward. At this point, chronological age cannot be used accurately. It is important for families to understand players of the same chronological age may differ in biological development by many years during these early teenage years and their methodological development and training level may not be the same. It’s important that we’re patient, let these players develop at their own rate, and give them the necessary time to catch up in biological development.
Conclusion
A consistent methodology will make sure players are getting the correct development regardless of a coach’s personal knowledge. While each coach may have their own flair to a session, the core ingredients being taught are cohesive and consistent across all the coaches, and the curriculum for sessions is developed based on fulfilling the whole pathway. As with every strong methodology, small changes are the key to refining it and each year the curriculum might be adjusted based on hindsight, however, following a multi-year-long plan based on the completion of all the steps by the time a player reaches their late teens is the foundation of this methodology and adhering to it is important to the whole. Innovily Sports utilizes a unique, nearly 50-page, training methodology based on the experience and science of both our own staff and outside organizations. It is the product of nearly a decade of research, implementation, and analysis. We’re incredibly proud of it and believe it sets our development apart from others.
Please remember that the youngest ages are not meant to create great sport-specific players, they’re meant to build foundational athleticism, cognitive development, and love for sports through games and sport-based activities. Our athletes will naturally improve sports-specific skills as they develop these abilities, but focusing on those skills themselves too early will divert attention from the development of their base motor-skills and coordinations which are vital to later development stages.