At this age, your athlete is still developing and growing. It is not exactly the right time to start pushing their athleticism. Instead, focus on developing it. At this age stage, from 6-10 years old, the focus should be on fundamentals. Fundamentals are the foundation for skill mastery to occur and stimulate the next set of skills to grow in the next age stage after ten years old. At this time, you want to use exercises, movements, and drills that emphasize repetition and fun to develop their fundamental proficiency. Fundamentals proficiency leads to superior athleticism. Like Michael Jordan said, “Get the fundamentals down, and everything you do will rise.”

Guidelines To Help You Create And Develop Appropriate Training Programs

• Drills are great to help your athletes focus and maintain attention. If you capture their attention, you will maximize their participation and enhance the execution of their skill using the drill. This prepares their focus at a greater athletic level later in life.
• Make sure the drills are fun, and the sport will be too.
• Simplify or modify the rules of the practice, drill, and game so children will pay more attention and not be confused about how to play. This will prevent their mind from wandering off and increase their interest.
• Teach fundamentals.

Set The Foundation For Athletic Skills To Advance

1) Train a multitude of functional movements.

This will help your athlete discover how their body moves. This is important for when they get to the next stage of athletic development after 10 years old. They can be more specific with athletic development, conditioning, exercises, sport-specific movements, and performance when they get older. But for now, teach the fundamentals for them to evolve, play and move functionally and correctly.

Emphasize multi-movement development by introducing various movements during drills or practices, including running, jumping forward and back, jumping side to side, catching, throwing, spinning, crawling, and rolling.

Show your athletes how to develop flexibility, coordination, and balance and why it is important

Encourage their participation in other sports like baseball, basketball, soccer, dance, etc. In addition, there are many recreational activities your athlete can do to develop various movement patterns.

Have your athletes play dodgeball, frisbee, or tag. These are great games for anyone and train reflexes, awareness, attention, speed, agility, explosiveness, and endurance. These games are also excellent to help your athlete’s spatial awareness.

You are trying to coordinate your athlete’s movements, nervous and musculoskeletal system, and reflexes. This is the time to do it. It is the developmental stage. Preparing their balance now, for instance, makes them more adept in the next stage of athletic development. If they don’t do it now, it won’t be easy later.

2) Focus on their depth perception and accuracy.

Have them run to cones at different lengths so your athlete can understand their energy to run short and far. Also, have them pass, kick or throw a ball at different lengths to understand distance and how to tame and use their force correctly to hit a target—no need to be strict. Just guide them. You can create games to see who can pass, kick or throw the ball closest to a cone.

3) Develop the basics, fundamentals, and functionality.

In doing this, your athlete will have accelerated development when they get older. For example, many professional athletes have incredible athleticism, but their movement patterns and basic functional movements are horrible. For instance, some cannot stand on one leg, lift the opposite arm, or hop up and down on one foot. These types of basic movements are the foundation of strength, speed, power, and explosive movements.

Emphasize balance on one foot. You can have your athletes do single-leg partnered squats. Once they have good strength and balance, you can have them jump or hop up and down, front and back, and side-to-side. Single-leg strength is vital because you are constantly pushing off of one foot when you cut on the field, walk, run or sprint.

4) Modify the playing environment. For example:

• Shorten the baseball field, the bases, and the pitcher’s mound.
• Lower the baskets in basketball and use a smaller ball.
• Shorten the size of the soccer fields and the goals.

It is crucial to emphasize correct and proper techniques. If you keep regulation fields and ball sizes, children will use poor techniques and force to kick or throw a ball they can’t handle, especially when learning. And they will develop poor, sloppy techniques that will continue as they get older.

Anaerobic and Aerobic Training

You can do anaerobic training, however, give your athlete’s proper rest between high-intensity exercise and don’t do too much. As for aerobic conditioning, kids can run around forever, even when they are tired. Aerobic training is much easier for your athlete because they have huge amounts of energy. Focus on fun games like relays and cone drills.

Set up about 6-8 stations. This will keep your athlete moving and motivated. Have them run to each station jogging or skipping. Skipping is excellent to develop reflexes, strength, and explosive development. As for stations, you can do push-ups, air squats, sit-ups, hops, jumps, side to side jumps, jumping jacks, planks, one leg balance for time, and or burpees. If you include burpees, make sure you understand how to teach them correctly.

You make it more challenging. You can increase the time from 30 to 45 seconds and increase reps from two to three times. You can also change the order of the circuit and exercises.

Another fun drill is piggybacking, wheelbarrows, and run holds. Set up three cones at 10-yard distances. Have them wheelbarrow to the first. Piggyback to the second and hold the pants for resistance to the third. It is a bit anaerobic, but it is fun. Safety first when doing these drills!

Train tracks. Line up 8 to 10 athletes in a row. The first one runs 5 yards and lays on the ground. The following athlete has to run and jump over the other lying on the ground. After jumping over, he runs 2 meters and lays on the ground. After the last athlete goes, the first one whom laid on the ground jumps up and continues. Repeat about 3-5 times. You can even play tag where one person stands up, and the next person stands up after 2 seconds and has to catch the first athlete before they lay down.

Strength Training

A big question and concern are, can my athlete strength train? The answer is yes but with rules and restrictions. If you don’t adhere to the rules then it is not healthy for your child.

Your athlete can start strength training, not bodybuilding or weight training, at seven years old. It will not stunt their growth if, and I say, if you do it correctly. At this age, it is about stimulation, control, and developing the correct way to move, not annihilate. If you use heavy weights and annihilate, then yes, you will stunt your athlete’s growth.

• Use lighter weights doing 12-15 reps for a few sets. A few days a week is perfectly fine. For this reason, your athlete’s growth plates are still open, so you don’t want to put any excessive force on their growth plates. You want the focus on your athlete’s body to continue growing.
• Focus on functional movement and their form to do the exercises correctly. Integrate their breathing into the exercises; something not taught in fitness today.
• Start with the basics and makes it fun.
• Make sure they have the proper supervision because kids constantly challenge each other to run faster, jump further. So, it can lead to who can lift more.

The initiation stage is the most critical phase. In this age stage, children involved in various exercises and activities will have more significant development with their reflexes and coordination in next stage of athletic development than those who do not. The next step is where you can increase the intensity and be more sport-specific. Suppose you try to introduce challenges, drills that are not similar to the child’s developmental process. In that case, it can delay your athlete’s development. Fundamentals are the building blocks for skills to advance and emerge. Without fundamentals, skills will not develop correctly.

Vince Lombardi said,” The mastery of fundamentals achieves excellence.”