When young athletes focus on mastering movement skills and patterns, they are building a broad foundation that will make them faster, stronger, more powerful, and robust athletes.
Why is Movement Mastery So Important for Young Athletes?
It’s because developing these movement patterns and skills helps the body learn how to optimally generate and transfer force. As a result, your muscles become better at producing force and your nervous system becomes better at coordinating movement. This leads to improved athletic performance and reduced risk of injury.
Developing movement skills also helps your body learn how to optimally use its energy. This leads to improved efficiency and better endurance. Furthermore, developing these movement patterns and skills can help prevent overuse injuries by teaching your body how to move in a more efficient and coordinated way.
In order to develop optimal movement patterns and agility, young athletes need to participate in a variety of different activities that challenge their bodies in different ways. This could include things like running, jumping, throwing, lifting weights, and playing sports.
It’s important for young athletes to do these activities under proper supervision by a qualified trainer/coach, so that they can develop skills efficiently and avoid unnecessary injuries. In addition, coaches can use movement analysis to help young athletes shape better movement patterns for their specific sport(s).
Examples of Movement Skills:
Some—but not all—movement skills and patterns that young athletes can focus on mastering are:
- Sprinting
- Running mechanics
- Jumping and landing
- Throwing and catching
- Weightlifting
- Sport-specific movements, e.g., dribbling a basketball, lateral movement and direction changes (as in football), swinging a hockey stick, etc.
Training to improve movement is important for developing overall athleticism. However, the focus for young athletes should be on developing a broad base of movement skills and patterns, rather than specializing in one particular area too early on.
By developing a broad base of movement skills and patterns, young athletes will become more well-rounded athletes and be better prepared for the demands of their chosen sport. Furthermore, by developing these skills at a young age, they will be more likely to carry them into adulthood, which can lead to a lifetime of enjoyment from physical activity.
Conclusion
Developing movement patterns and skills is an important part of becoming a better athlete. It helps your body learn how to optimally generate and transfer force, use energy more efficiently, and prevent overuse injuries.
Whether you’re a young athlete or an adult athlete, you should focus on mastering movement patterns and skills to improve your athletic performance and reduce your risk of injury.