Athletics’ Fundamentals
A Guide for Improving Skills of Young Athletes
Athletics’ Fundamentals – WHAT IS A COACH?
If you say “well done” to your son or daughter or a young athlete you are a coach
If you ask how she or he went at an event, you are a coach.
When you yell encouragement to a competitor, you are a coach.
If you have driven someone to training or competition, you are a coach.
I define a coach as anyone who “maximisers the potential of an athlete” – at whatever level.
Driving an athlete to training contributes to this.
So, let’s not be afraid of the word “coach”.
You are a coach, whether you see yourself as one or not.
1. Encouragement is perhaps coaching at its most basic level.
2. There are many levels, and none are any more important than any other.
3. The next level is being able to help an athlete avoid mistakes and errors – making sure the athlete is not doing something wrong.
4. Then there is the adding of skills, teaching the right way to do something.
5. Then there are the many, many layers of adding more skills.
6. Then you have the layers involving planning, strategies, tactics, psychology –
7. For example, defining the mesocycles and microcycles then determining the objectives of each then planning training units within each cycle that will meet the chosen objectives to have an athlete at their peak on the right day.
Coaching is many layers … and the last mentioned is no more or no less important than teaching basic skills or trying to eliminate technique errors in a 10-year-old. Some people will coach at the first one, two or three levels … others will coach at different levels, but the most elite coach still must be able to operate at any level.
This handbook and course is about the second and third levels – eliminating errors and adding basic skills.
Finally, words from Franz Stampfl, one of the great athletics coaches of all time, describing what it is to be a coach…
“ …when the shouting is over, when the senior partner in the firm has broken the record and joined the immortals, the junior partner’s reward comes from the satisfaction of a job well done. Who could ask for more.?”
Indeed, but note, the coach is the junior partner, the athlete the senior partner. We must always bear in mind that it is the athlete’s sport, we as coaches at whatever level, are there to support.
WHAT IS A WINNER
The emphasis here is on the FUN of FUNDAMENTALS. Sport is fun. Children do athletics for just one reason – they want to have fun. Doing something well, succeeding, learning a skill all adds to the fun.
Competition is the purpose of our sport. Winning is the purpose of competing. However, winning is not necessarily coming first. It can be finishing higher in the field than last time, jumping higher, jumping better, learning about and applying tactics, it can be an athlete learning something new about themselves or the sport, it could be accepting and meeting a challenge.
Most of all, it’s having fun. If you’re enjoying yourself how can you be a loser?
The Athlete First.
A club helper or coach should never lose sight of the fact that the focus of their activities is the athlete. It is not the sport, not their club, not the school or squad and certainly not their own ego or personal satisfaction.
Put the athlete first and the club and sport, not to mention the coach’s reputation and satisfaction, will all benefit in the long run.
AGE AND ATHLETICS
Young athletes develop at different rates and growth patterns vary considerably. Also, individuals can have limbs or parts of the body growing at different times and rates, so a youngster is unfamiliar with his or her own body.
Skills that were previously easy may prove difficult; coordination can be lost. You need to recognize that bodies change through growth.
The good 10-year-old may be an average senior competitor; the average 11-year-old may develop into a brilliant senior.
To 10 – play. Make training based around games – avoid suggestion of “training”. Children this age consider sport as social activity, so make it so. At this stage youngsters have developed neural system so can absorb learning. This is when they can start to learn basic technique and skills.
10 – 14 – learning. Now is the time for skill development as the neural system is well developed – bad habits learnt now are difficult to undo, good habits learnt now are there forever. Children this age have little anaerobic capacity so avoid heavy anaerobic work and there is limited response to aerobic training so there is little potential to develop VO2max. Athletics should still be fun based – fartlek, games – circuits. This is the time to encourage young athletes to look ahead, to do some goal setting.
Adolescence – 12 +. “Age of confusion” handle with care. Emotional instability, physical instability. With the different growth rates in the body performances can be inconsistent and there is danger of injury. The athlete should now start to specialize, although attention should be paid to other skills and athletic events as well. Focus on fewer activities – skill development – make challenges, but tailor activity to the athlete, not athlete to the activity.
16 up are the investment years. Athletes want to be the best they can be – now is practice rather than play – key is performance.
Consider it takes 10 years to master any skill – 10 years to develop a sprinter and 15 years for the neural patterns to fully develop the skill (i.e. to learn to sense an action before it is sent to the muscles!)
Another way of looking at it is 4 years of train to play – 4 years of train to train – 4 years of train to compete (event specific now) – then train to win. This is 12 years of development which is 3 Olympic cycles. And the most important is the first part – the fun of Fundamental’s.
What’s Included
WARMING UP
SPRINTS
CROUCH START
HURDLES
DISTANCE AND MIDDLE DISTANCE
RELAYS
BASIC RULES for RUNNING EVENTS.
HIGH JUMP
LONG JUMP
TRIPLE JUMP
SHOT PUT
DISCUS
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Regards, Coyalita Linville
Behavioral Health Rehabilitative Specialist & Drug and Alcohol Addiction Counselor
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