Some athletes are born. Most are created.
Sure, the 6’5” 225lb QB or the 6’9” wing who could dunk in 6th grade might be outliers who were born to succeed, but most collegiate athletes, and even many pro athletes, had to build themselves physically and mentally from the ground up. They have left a blueprint behind on how to create an athlete that can take even a child with below average genetics and make them a player.
Speed Kills
Sprinting with 100% effort will make you faster. You used to play outside, race your friends, and what happened on the playground mattered more than anything for you as a kid. Now, unfortunately, children aren’t given the leash to do that. They need motivation to move with 100% effort. They typically, whether we like it or not, need to train in order to really get faster. Why not train smart?
Sprinting with 100% effort isn’t the only thing you need to get faster as an athlete. You need to understand your body angle on acceleration (45 degrees), the hammer back with your arms as you pick up speed, and the force application into the ground. Understanding how to drive your knee forward, how to push the ground away, and how to reduce ground contact time down the field goes a long way to optimizing your speed.
Not only do you need to know these things as an athlete, but it sure helps to break down film to understand your mechanics. It helps to have some external motivation, like a coach encouraging you or a time that you know you need to beat.
If your speed is being measured consistently, you know what’s working and what’s not. You know when you’re at full health, and when you need to take a look at your mechanics, your power, or your strength levels in order to keep progressing.
Strength Dominates
Find me a college or pro athlete and I’ll show you a kid who did some form of strength training before High School. If you want to create an athlete, strength training is required. Starting with push-ups, chin-ups, squats, lunges, and planks builds a foundation. Learning to use a dumbbell in middle school bridges a gap and creates good movement patterns for when you hit 13 or 14. That’s when your strength can really take off.
Strength makes you faster. It makes you bigger. It makes you more mobile and less injury prone. Strength is done by every single athlete for a reason: it’s required for success.
Athletes typically need to lift heavy weight for low reps to improve their absolute strength. They need to lift moderate weight quickly to increase their power. And they need to lift for volume in order to get larger, which is helpful in most sports, at least to an extent. Proper programing under a watchful coaching eye will ensure they progress at a pace that makes sense while staying fresh and healthy.
A common misconception about strength training is that it may cause injury. In fact, when done correctly, it is the number one factor in *preventing* injuries. Lets dive deeper:
Resiliency Matters
In order to reduce the risk of injury, you need to get stronger. The most common issue I see in athletes is that they have weak glutes, which causes everything from hamstring pulls and sprained ankles to torn knee ligaments and injured backs. They need to strengthen not only their glutes, but their core muscles and pretty much everything else in their body. Athletes need to balance these muscles the best they can in order to prevent injury.
They also need to perform maintenance on those muscles with things like foam rolling and mobility training. Find out what’s tight, loosen it, then find out why it was tight, and strengthen that. It’s a formula we use often with athletes and (knock on wood) we keep our injury rates extremely low. The best ability is availability!
You Are What You Eat
Is your child a picky eater? The best athletes figure out how to overcome that. They need to eat in order to fuel their bodies to perform on the field, in practice, and in training. It’s a year round commitment to building muscle, improving their energy, and staying healthy.
We typically give some standard advice when discussing athlete nutrition:
0.8-1g of protein per pound of body weight every day.
Body weight x 14-17 in calories at a minimum.
Drink 60-100% of your body weight in ounces of water.
If an athlete can pull this off consistently, they will maintain or gain muscle, maintain high energy levels, and perform their best.
Confidence Is Key
Think about the most athletic person you’ve ever seen. Think about the best dunk or the wildest catch or the longest home run. It’s not always by the best player, but by the best athlete. The difference between the best athlete and the best player is the confidence and the work ethic to become the best. If you want to create an athlete, the child and the parent have to focus on building confidence.
As a personal story, I was one of the fastest kids in my high school. I was the only one who could dunk a basketball. And I was pretty skilled. But I wasn’t very good. Because I lacked confidence for some reason. I wouldn’t take the shot in basketball, I would talk myself out of swinging the bat, and I wouldn’t even try out for the football team, even though I would have easily made it.
Confidence matters to me tremendously in our gym because I felt the power of it, and I see the power of it on a daily basis with the kids we train. If you can create a confident child, you can create a really good athlete.
Positive talk, hype over the good things, understanding the preparation, and having a strong, supportive influence will make all the difference in turning a great athlete into a great player. If you’ve worked on everything else in this essay, and you still aren’t getting the results you want, there is a great chance confidence, and the proper mindset, are to blame.
Consistency Is King
Athletes who accomplish their goals and “make it” don’t look at the list above as a chore. They just do it all, almost every day. They don’t just simply play their sport, especially as they get older. They prepare their bodies and their minds every single day to play that sport. They develop routines. They are so consistent it would make the average person cringe.
But they make it. And they create an athlete in themselves that they dreamed about as a little kid. They may have been born with solid genetics, but the most important genetic trait is the mindset to do what they have to do to succeed and become great. If they are consistent in all of these things, they will reach the highest level possible. That’s a skill for sports, but most of all, for life.
If Parisi can help you create an athlete and help your child achieve their dreams, contact us and learn more about our performance evaluation process!
