WHAT ARE SOME ACTIVITIES THAT KIDS CAN DO THAT ARE JUST GOOD FOR THEM? - Blog

[Guest Prosoft Admin]

That’s really an insightful question from one of our listeners.  It’s not just about getting better performance at a particular sport.  It’s not about coming up with the very best drills for skill development or for power or agility.
 
This listener really reminds us that we’ve got to take a step back and consider some foundational athletic abilities that run through multiple sports and ages and don’t necessarily discriminate between boys and girls. 
 
Let’s start with this:  more and more these days we see younger and younger athletes starting to dedicate themselves to a single sport year round.  While this undoubtedly brings with it a much greater volume of skill development hours it also, of course, invites in the “over training bug” that can bite an athlete who is constantly performing the same activity over and over again.
 
Diversity…variability….new stimuli….these things are all part of nervous system training.  Not that they don’t demand unique things from the muscles and the metabolism as well.  They may produce a valuable training effect on an athlete from a conditioning or simply a strength or power perspective.  But I think the greatest value is likely in the challenge put to the nervous system.
 
When our bodies experience the same movement patterns and challenges over and over again there can become a staleness and a reliance on old, familiar pathways.  While it’s been said that “Perfect practice makes perfect” and there is certainly something to that idea of making sure technique is good and quality is high during skill training especially, I would also argue that oftentimes that constant attention to being too structured in our perfect movement patterning can also reduce our nervous system’s ability to handle subtle nuances or changes that might happen during a sport.
 
Unique challenges can bring the need for the nervous system to go to work and figure new approaches, new movement patterns…and create laying down of new neural pathways.  As our nervous system works to figure out these new tasks and challenges our athleticism is kicked up a notch.  We become more diverse and more capable athletically of handling the variations that can come up in sports.
 
There are some general activity ideas that might accomplish this….just play sports that you’re less familiar with or that you, in fact, aren’t good at.  Force your nervous system to adapt.  Challenge it in ways that you tend to struggle with, so that you become more fluid, more coordinated, more adaptable. 
 
Another trick is to use your opposite or non-dominant limb more.  You might work at kicking a soccer ball with the opposite foot more often, and then increase your demand by working at specific targets with that foot.  You can begin throwing with your opposite hand or using your racket or stick with the opposite hand.  Even brush your teeth, brush your hair, or eat with the opposite hand.  Try it…it’s harder than you’d think.  Imagine all the neural pathways that had to be laid down and perfected for you to have become so fluid and automatic on the dominant side you now don’t have to think about at all.
 
Other examples are tossing a ball into a target like a can or basket.  Toss it from different distances.  Use different size or weight balls, like a tennis ball and a basketball.  Your body will have to deal with the variability and confusion of the different sizes of grip and control of the ball along with the weight changes, while figuring how to cover the same distance into the basket or can.  You might pick a reasonable and safe distance and place some chalk marks on the driveway or spray paint some targets on the back lawn and jump to slightly different directions and (reasonable) distances so your body (ie nervous system) has to adapt to varying demands.  Now those subtle challenges force your nervous system to adjust and find precise changes in the instructions to the muscle system to try to perform accurately.