Hey everyone, I have been asked to write up an article about the proper procedure for a warm up. Simply, there is no right or wrong answer. It comes down to what works for that specific individual and what gets the best results long term.
Specifically lets talk about younger athletes and how warm up may or may not affect their performance. You will find that a lot of people, including professionals and non professionals believe that warm up is needed. Text books will say 10-15 minute warm up is crucial for a few reasons.
- increase core temperature
-increase blood flow
-mental visualization of up coming events
- joint mobility and flexibility
- etc
The list goes on and on depending who you ask, I find these are the ones that are well known to the majority. For high level athletes most warm up and cool down for at least 15 minutes to decrease soreness and increase training adaptations. For younger children say at a gymnastics club who are recreational and comes once a week, what good does a warm up do? Does it provide benefits? If so, what ones? If not, Why not? What is the extent of the benefit? is it worth it? All these questions arise when talking about younger individuals who do not even understand the concept of training due to the fact they have not been around the world of athletics long enough.
Lets take a 5 year old kid who is in a gymnastics program once a week for an hour at the local gym club. For the sake of the article lets say this is an average kid who won't be the next Usain Bolt. He will play sports recreationally and eventually be good at one enough to make the high school team but then get a desk job at microsoft after slaving a few years through post graduate education. Bleak as it may sound, this is an average because most people do not make sports a life long journey. Very few can do sport full time with a small job on the side but inevitably most of us have to work at a job. The parent of this child wants the child to learn coordination, balance, agility, social conventions, strength, flexibility, speed, etc. We must remember that the parent is paying the money for an hour of learning and fun incorporated into a fun environment. At five years old, it has to be as fun for the parent as it is for the child. Lets face it, if the parent does not believe the child is getting anything out of it, even if the child tells the parent he or she likes it the parent won't pay money. The child can have fun in a play ground for free; they come here to learn from someone who hopefully has a good handle on the concepts of gymnastics, both mental and physical.
Now lets look at the basic warm up and compare. If you have done gymnastics then you will be familiar with this and can skim through but if not then here is how it normally works.
-5 minutes of running/jogging/walking/walking in different positions/hopping etc in a circular motion around the floor apparatus
-10 minute stretch where kids start from head and stretch all major muscle groups to the toes ( if the stretch is done properly)
** this is done as a group usually of a few different sections with 2,3,4 + coaches all participating in the warm up. The norm is 2 or 3 coaches to about 20 kids.
After this 15 minute warm up the classes split up into their rightful sections and the coaches take their 5 or 6(+-2) athletes and go to separate events. If you ask any coach out there who has ever led a warm up how many kids actually follow what you are doing then you will hear the same thing usually. Most kids do not follow or not 100% at least. There are the special kids who follow instructions perfectly but unfortunately there is a huge factor that no one can control that prevents a proper warm up from taking place with almost every young kid. PAIN. If stretching is done correctly it will not feel good. It will feel like muscles are being pulled, joints are on "fire", burning, tearing etc. All these words have been used by different people I have trained from young kids to older national level athletes. as soon as a kid feels a slight sense of non-comfortability ( if that's a word) , they will stop immediately. Out of 20 kids who are 9 and under I will have one or two who actually hold the position despite the pain. Many will fight you when you come and GENTLY persuade them to do the stretch properly.
In a 1 hour class I do not have time to sit around and force kids into positions they don't want to be in. Yes arguably stretching is good but it does not matter if you know it, it matters if they know it. Sure you can tell the kid 100 times that it is suppose to feel weird and uncomfortable but most kids are primitive. If they don't see or feel an immediate benefit then they don't want to do it. sad to say but adults are the same way. Try to tell someone to do something that they don't understand. Wont work. Yes I could sit down for 20 minutes and tell the kids about exactly why stretching is good but that does not matter to the average kid. Kids are to hedonistic to care. They want what they want and they do not care about the long term effects. Not blaming them, just stating something I have noticed. Hypothetically a one on one situation with all the kids in the warm up would yield better results because the coach can focus entirely on that one individual. Good luck doing that to 20 kids in 30 seconds. (that's how long the average stretch is held by a rec coach, not saying it is the right or wrong amount of time). even with 3 other coaches you wont have the time to get to every kid in a concise manor where learning and understanding actually takes place. So after this 15 minute warm up where the kids who want to stretch do and the majority who hate it don't then what do you have? Absolutely nothing. The kids are not more flexible because you just had 10 seconds to show them the right mechanics before the other kid needed help. The kids are now bored. More hyper probably after sitting and standing in a single spot stretching and worst of all the parent is wondering what they are paying for. But wait it gets better. So let's say you are a coach and decide stretching is crucial for their development of the child. Now you take them aside and do not go on events because the kids do not know how to stretch and time needs to be given to that. So you spend another 15 minutes going through the basics of stretching. "What if you just pick one stretch a day and go through it?" Great idea, if the child saw you more then once a week and have nothing else to focus on. Many people who work with kids understand how hard it can be to teach a child even the simplest concepts. 5 minutes out of 10,080 minutes until the next class a week later is not going to teach them much. You also have to factor in retention ability and the want to learn. In my opinion and only my opinion, I believe that that time could be spent doing many other things. Gymnastics unfortunately, at the rec level is no more then the minimum does of physical activity for the day. Majority of the kids do not take away anything that is used in their lives later on. Social abilities come from school and home. Any school of thought will tell you that everyone needs more then 1 hour of physical activity a week so the child must be getting it from somewhere else mostly. Learning comes from school. Gymnastics is just a way for kids to taste something different. I don't know about everyone else but if I am at a new restaurant with foreign food, I don't want to consult the food guide to see what is my best option. I see something or smell something I want to try and I go for it. Why would gymnastics be any different. I guess the question I am asking is, " do the kids really gain enough in 1 hour of rec gymnastics in order to try and instil training techniques at such a young age?" My answer would be no. Gym is a play park to them. How many kids stretch before going on the swing ? Make FUN the majority of what they are doing and if the kid decides that one day they really want to take their gymnastics to a new level then start incorporating flexibility and all these other boring things. Let them be kids. It wont hurt them. The child is not going to rip a tendon doing a tuck jump. Stop wasting those precious 15 minutes and let the kid play a game to warm up for 5 minutes then take them on events for 55 minutes. Let the kid actually learn to like gymnastics before you hit them with the hard facts. Us as adults don't like brutal honesty, most people want to be lulled into an uncomfortable situation rather then just be thrown into it. Let the kid be a kid and not an olympic athlete.
Many do not agree with this and that is fine. I am just stating what I find works as I mentioned earlier. One man who disagrees with me goes by the name of Chris Dal Cin who is a physiologist at Canadian Sports Center in Toronto. He explained that he would try to teach kids stretching because it instils an athletic attitude in the child for later use in a specific sport, whatever that may be. I agree and preparation is one of the prerequisites for becoming a good athlete. But is 5-9 yrs to early? Many eastern block countries such as Japan do not let the children specialize until about 14 years old. This could be because it enables the child to get a good grip on the basic strength and conditioning principals before picking a sport to specialize. This allows an easier learning curve instead of information overload. Felicia, my co coach at Halton Hills explained this to me and I understand how that makes sense. Introducing so much to someone so quick usually results in a large percentage of the information to leak out. What the eastern countries do really coincides with what I am saying about not focusing on stretching so much. Allow the child to grow a bit have some fun and when that child a long with the parents decide it's time to move up, then introduce the harsh realities of the sport. Let the kids be kids for now.
:)
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