Athletic development and dominance at a young age is becoming a real factor in sports nowadays. We have athletes becoming household names at younger ages than ever before in many major sports and there seems to be a real push for young athletes to be ready for full professional sport at younger ages. It has got to the point if that by the age of 18 or 19, if you haven’t hit the physical standards by which professional teams expect, you are very little chance of having a professional career. If you’re not there by early 20’s there is slim chance of you getting a chance later in your career. Not many break into professional sport at older ages nowadays.

 

This leads to the development of Strength and Conditioning (S&C) with in youth development and the need for a close look at the long-term athletic development (LTAD) of youth athletes. For many sports, speed is a dominating factor, whether it is short acceleration bursts or all out maximal longer sprints, speed dominates most other attributes. The problem that many people feel is that speed is hereditary and that those young athletes who are fast at a young age, grow up to be fast at an older age. To an extent this is correct, but maybe not for the reasons many people think of.

 

Those who are fast at a young age have 1 or 2 factors that determine their speed; Running technique and possible Tendon stiffness. The first is easy to fix, the second takes slightly longer, and might well be something that is difficult to train into other athletes. A study by Lloyd and Oliver (2012) looked into a new approach to LTAD, namely the Youth Physical Development Model (YPDM). Within the YPDM they broke down pre adolescent to post adolescent children’s strengths and what factors can and can’t be worked on at different ages. Their model shows a thorough insight into youth development and helps to understand Peak Height Velocity and the development of children through the ages.

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FIGURE 1: Lloyd and Olivers YPDM. Light Blue boxes are preadolescent periods of adaptation whilst the dark blue are adolescent. SSS is Sport-Specific Skills, FMS is Fundamental movement skills, MC is Metabolic Conditioning, and PHV is Peak Height Velocity

 

Figure 1 shows Lloyd and Oliver’s YPDM for boys, and within it, it is clear to see when and where young athletes should be developing different skills. The difference in font shows when physical qualities should be prioritised in relation to age. Their model shows that Speed, Power, Strength and Agility should all start to be focussed on from the age of 5 in Males, and then developed further from the age of 12. There is a definite  need for young athletes to be developing speed from a young age, and a potential safety aspect for this too. The LTAD model advocates that there is a small gap of opportunity for sprint development, but this seems more age related. Speed can be starting to develop from 5 years old, so that by the time they reach 12 their basic movement patterns are in place. There are studies however, that show that prepubescent athletes develop best when taking part in training that requires high levels of neural activation (Rumpf, Cronin, Oliver, & Hughs, 2015) – such as sprint focussed drills and training, as well as Plyometric exercises. Compared to adolescents who seem to respond better to training that targets both Structural and neural – strength training as well as sprint training and plyometric. Lloyd and Oliver have analysed these findings by exclaiming that they believe that prepubescent athletes should spend the majority of their training time on developing their plyometric ability as well as technical running efficiency and sprint work to further enhance their physical capabilities.

 

In a study by Papaiakovou et al., (2009) it was discovered that by the age of 12-sprint speed is around  75% of what it will be as an adult, compared to strength, which is between 40 and 50%. For most this would argue the case for  innate sprint abilities, but this could further build the argument for semi-structured speed work at a young age. If athletes as young as 7 or 8 were taught basic fundamentals of sprint running technique (Myer, Lloyd, Brent, & Faigenbaum, 2013), whilst developing their overall strength through resistance training and power through plyometric there could be a huge improvement in their running technique and speed by the age of 12. At the moment, most of these athletes are born fast and pick up running technique quickly with out much coaching. The study by Papaiakovou, et al., was performed on 360 males and females between the ages of 7 and 18, so more research will have to go into this to prove its worth, however the results of this show a possible indication for the need to improve sprint performance and technique earlier in order to develop speed further down the line. This study was further backed up by Nikolaidis, Knechtle, Clemente, and Torres-Luque, 2016, in a study of 474 football players between the ages of 9 and 35 years, which showed an increase in speed between U10 and U15 before it started to plateau.

 

In another study which compared the difference between stride length and stride rate between preadolsent, adolescent and post adolescent (Chatzilazardis, Panoutsakopoulos, & Papaiakovou, 2012), it was shown that stride rate dominated speed at early years and stride length developed over time. This is mainly to do with the fact that with age comes increased strength as well as power development and therefore faster and greater ground reaction forces. With the help of the YPDM and the research from Nikolaidis et al., which explains that the combination of running technique progression plus growth maturation is the overriding factor within speed development, athletes could develop their abilities from a younger age thus potentially increasing their abilities as an adult.

 

Young children should be learning through schools on basic fundamental movements. Easy movements (Myer et al., 2013) such as squat, hinge, lunge, push, pull, jump, land etc. Which can then be integrated into more complex movements, which will develop sporting ability and in this case, sprint ability. The hypothesis being that if from the age of 5 young athletes are taught to master these movements as part of Functional Movement lessons within Physical Education, which can then be developed into multi complex movements as they get older and more technically efficient, there is probable cause for overall speed development to be higher than what it would be if speed was left to basic body development.

 

Reference List:

 

• Chatzilazardis, I., Panoutsakopoulos, V., & Papaiakovou, G. (2012). Stride characteristics progress in a 40-m sprinting test executed by male preadelescent, adolescent and adult athletes. Biology of Exercise , 8 (2), 59-78.

• Lloyd, R. S., & Oliver, J. L. (2012). The youth physical development model: a new approach to long-term athletic development. Strength and Conditioning Journal , 34 (3), 61-72.

• Myer, G. D., Lloyd, R. S., Brent, J. L., & Faigenbaum, A. D. (2013). How young is "too young" to start training? ACSMs Health Fit Journal , 17 (5), 14-23.

• Nikolaidis, P. T., Knechtle, B., Clemente, F., & Torres-Luque, G. (2016). Reference values for the sprint performance in male football players aged from 9-35. Biomedical Human Kinetics , 8, 103-112.

• Papaiakovou, G., Giannakos, A., Michailidis, C., Patikas, D., Bassa, E., Kalopsis, V., et al. (2009). The effect of chronological age and gender on the development of sprint performance during childhood and puberty. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research , 23 (9), 2568-2573.

• Rumpf, M. C., Cronin, J. B., Oliver, J. L., & Hughs, M. G. (2012). Effect of different training methods on running sprint times in male youth. Journal of Pediatric Exercise and Science , 24 (2), 170-86.