If you have been following my website for a while now, you probably know that I’m a big advocate of an appropriate long term development plan for every athletes.  I strongly stand against early sport specialization and I honestly think that if we would get away from that, we would have a lot less of injuries in sports and surgeries related to overuse.  It is very hard to get people to understand that when you have 90% of people involved in sports training (parents, coaches and trainers) that advocate the exact opposite: if you want to get better in a certain sport, you need to play more and more and more and do it year-round as young as possible so you can develop better. 

I went into great details in previous blog posts why this is a totally retarded way of thinking.  By doing so, you’re not developping better athletes, you’re actually developping patterns for overuse injuries.  That being said, it is our job as strength coaches to educate athletes and parents on why this is so bad and how they should go about training the right way and following a good development model for optimal development and long career as injury-free as possible.

The first step to take in that direction is obviously to have the different national sport associations to endorse a good development model and help promote that to organizations, coaches, parents and players.  The big problem we have right now is that these organizations don’t get it.  So when you see steps taken in the right direction, it’s really satifying to know that they start to get it and want to help change the trend that is currently poisoning most sports.  Mike Boyle gave a presentation about the long term athletic development for hockey players to USA Hockey a couple of days ago.  Coach Boyle is one of the smartest, most experienced strength coach out there; he has seen it all in his long career and he has probably trained more hockey players than anybody else in the world.  Most athletes he trains, if not all, turn out to have long careers and very few injuries; so, there’s gotta be something he’s doing right.  Here is the video of the presentation.  I need to warn you that it is an hour and 20 minutes long, but make sure you listen  to it; it’s all really worth it. 

To me, to know that USA Hockey actually took a step in the right direction and took the time to listen what coach Boyle had to say, tells a lot about the organization and where they’re headed (they also made several changes within the organization and to their development model recently).    Don’t be surprised to see more and more American hockey players emerge at the pro levels in the next decade or two.

Please, if you know anyone involved (closely or not) in sports, you need to forward this blog post or just the video to them, whether they’re parents, coaches, athletes and anyone else.

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