Coach Education Resources
Cracking the Code of Adolescent Athlete Development: What Every Track and Field Coach Should Know
Navigating the wild ride of adolescent athlete development can be a challenge for track and field coaches. One moment, your athletes are improving by leaps and bounds, and the next, they’re struggling with coordination and stagnating in performance. This article dives into the science behind these changes—why boys experience explosive gains post-puberty, why girls may hit a plateau, and how to tailor training to capitalise on critical windows of development.
Understanding and Managing the Performance Plateau in Adolescent Athletes
Puberty brings a wave of hormonal, biomechanical, and psychological changes that can temporarily disrupt an athlete’s performance. Sprint times may slow, endurance can dip, coordination may feel off, and frustration can set in—especially for female athletes navigating mid adolescence.
But a plateau isn’t a dead end—it’s a phase of adaptation. In this article, we explore the four key factors affecting performance during puberty and provide practical, science-backed coaching strategies to help athletes regain confidence, refine technique, and unlock their full potential.
The Functional Movement Screen
The Functional Movement Screen (FMS) is a tool for evaluating an athlete's functional movement patterns. In this article, we break down how the FMS works, assess its effectiveness in identifying movement inefficiencies and asymmetries, and why it may be a useful addition to your coaching toolkit.
Engagement, Connection, and Inspiration in Coaching
Explore the art of coaching through Wayne Goldsmith’s perspective, focusing on building genuine connections, fostering engagement, and inspiring athletes beyond mere physical training. Goldsmith highlights a concerning global decline in youth sports participation, arguing that traditional, metric-driven coaching approaches often miss what truly motivates young athletes: meaningful relationships and a sense of purpose.
Recommended Training Loads for Teenage Athletes: A Guide to Optimal Development
Training young athletes is a delicate balance of enhancing performance while ensuring safety, longevity, and enjoyment in sports. Overtraining can lead to burnout or injury, while undertraining may limit athletic potential. For junior athletes, particularly those aged 12-18 in track and field, the correct training loads are crucial to optimizing their development while preventing injury.
This article discusses the recommended training loads for young athletes, focusing on the balance between technique, strength training, and recovery. We’ll explore research-backed guidelines and provide insights into how to tailor programs for individual athletes’ needs.
Conditioning Young Athletes
Episode 1 of a short-lived AI Podcasting era! This episode summarises the key points from the book "Conditioning Young Athletes" by Tudor O. Bompa and Michael Carrera.
Our AI hosts discuss the importance of long-term athletic development for young athletes, emphasizing the need for age-appropriate training methods to optimise performance and prevent burnout and injury.
Using Effective Coaching Cues
For track and field coaches and athletes, coaching cues are a great tool for instructing and reinforcing the desired skill components.
However, there is strong evidence to suggest that not all cues are equally effective.
This article delves into the critical role of coaching cues – specifically, external and internal cues – in shaping athletes' performance, including their ability to develop and retain newly acquired skills.