Why Do You Test Young Athletes?
By Brian Grasso
How to test a group of young athletes has become a popular 'discussion board' question recently. I have seen this query raised on several prominent websites and have been asked about it a great deal over the last fe months. Thus... my desire to touch on the subject.
The common curiosity surrounds how to test absolute strength ability via 1, 4 or 8 RM (rep maximum). The thought process is that once a trainer or coach has a baseline measurement of a given athletes strength capacity, they can deduce two specific things:
1. The strength gain(s) that an athlete will see following a training program (because inevitably they will re-test the athlete at the conclusion of there 6 or 8 week training cycle).
2. The percentage of absolute strength the athlete can and should perform their training programs (for example, if a 1RM squat equals 225 pounds, than a ‘training weight’ may be 70% of that, or 158 pounds).
Biomotor improvements (strength, speed, flexibility) are not hard to come by with young athletes and are often just as attributable to their natural adolescent maturation process as they are to any ‘cutting edge’ training program a given trainer or coach will put together. More over, as demonstrated in countless studies, detraining effects will occur in a relatively short period of time once the training program has concluded.
Pursuant to the above point, we must progress away from the ‘value-intensive’ practice of training young athletes in short bursts (6 – 8 weeks) and shift to a more long-term and ‘principal-focused’ approach to working with kids. In that, a given training program would not look to isolate and improve biomotor ability as much as it would act as a teaching agent with a focus on improving transferability to sport.
In this value to principle shift I suggest, we must also look to take pressure off of kids in general. Like it or not, if you adhere to test/re-test training programs of short durations, you are allowing that athlete to think only of the numbers and specific improvement gains. Kids should not be placed in a situation where the efficacy of their training is based on how much more they can squat in week 7 than they did in week 1.
Again, your focus as a trainer or coach should be on technical ability and improvements in this consideration. Create RTA (rate of technical ability) charts that mark how well a child is progressing from a form and function standpoint. Not only is this a more ‘teaching-based’ approach to conditioning, but it also changes the focus and mental stress for the athlete – from performance considerations (i.e. how much weight can they lift) to technical considerations (i.e. how well can they lift it).
One of the more problematic issues I have seen in this debate revolves around why a trainer or coach is testing at all.
The reason to test must be completely based on what you want to glean from the results... and most coaches and trainers don't seem to see that clearly enough.
For example, one of the questions that was recently posed to me was in reference to a freshman baseball team (14 year old athletes). The coach told me straight out that the kids had little to no experience in terms of strength training, so testing the squat would not be a worthwhile assessment. Instead, the coach wanted to know if leg press or leg extension would be more feasible because they lack technical difficulty.
Points to consider:
If you know that the kids have no lifting expertise, than by nature of that conclusion, your role as a trainer/coach is to teach. Period. There is simply no reason to test strength capacity in a situation where the kids you are working with have no experience at all. That is part of the dogmatic thinking that must change in our youth training culture.
Leg press and leg extension are silly exercises that will do more harm than good to anyone. Specifically, lumbar rounding in the leg press and anterior sheering at the knee joint with leg extension make the risk/reward ratio of these exercises useless. Additionally, and this speaks to my statement above, what is the point of testing strength on an apparatus that you have no intension of using during training? Again, you must first ascertain why you are testing.
The reality is that in the United States, many high schools use a programming model that is based on test/re-test situations right from freshman through varsity. The notion that incoming freshman, with little to no technical ability, are being asked to perform strength assessments from day one is nothing short of ridiculous… oh… and maybe a touch dangerous as well.
Teach... Teach... Teach...
I cannot re-state that enough. Forget about testing biomotor ability and concentrate on actually teaching young athletes the skills they need to excel in sport and to remain injury free. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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