A crazy mom a few years ago wanted to hire me to train her baseball star son.  She wanted me to work on his rotational strength and forward speed.

No problem for the Lukester.  Until I found out she had also hired:

• a hitting coach
• a throwing coach
• a conditioning coach
• a lateral speed coach

And that was in addition to his normal baseball practice!

Oh, did I mention he was 8 freaking years old?!?!

I declined her offer.  (I tend to rub other coaches the wrong way )

Also, I think sports should actually be FUN for kids.

Before puberty is the best time to play all sorts of sports, to build a wide base of motor skills and movement patterns.  Kids who specialize too early are at MAJOR risk for burnout and injury before they ever get to college.

Here’s a quote from The Development Of The Russian Conjugate Sequence System (Myslinski):

“At an early age (approximately 6.5-9 years old+ 1 year), the initial preparation stage begins. This stage is the cornerstone in the pursuit of PASM (Process of Attaining Sports Mastery) and is characterized by the progressive development of motor skills through a traditional multifaceted motor preparedness and the creation of a functional groundwork for specialized perfecting of motor abilities. Its exclusive goal is to expose young athletes to a wide variety of physical skills, thus stimulating a healthy development and increasing their functional capacities, motor abilities and knowledge base. Additionally, exposing the pre-adolescent sportsman to a well-rounded curriculum negates the effects of early specialization and elevates their overall adaptation level”

Or, to put it another way, children should minor in all sports and major in none.

What practical advice do I have?  (This Fitness For 10 Year Olds Series could just be a rant about overweight kids, but I want everyone to have some things to take action on)

1. Sign your kid up for all sorts of different classes.  6 weeks of karate, 12 weeks of soccer, a volleyball seminar
2. Lock up the Wii and XBox.  WiiFit doesn’t count as exercise.  Make kids spend time outside playing to earn time inside sitting.
3. Play sports yourself.  Your kids will follow your example.
4. Understand that sports have winners and losers.  Learning how to handle a loss is a valuable skill, don’t let your kids quit just because they can’t handle losing.
5. Read the Youth Fitness Solution.  It’s a nutrition and exercise program for parents to use with their kids.

That’s it!  The take-home message for today is: Kids should play sports, and play a lot of them!

Last week I teamed up with Dr. Brian Russell to do a presentation on keeping young athletes healthy and performing at the top of their game. We did four seminars for the parents at Capital City Volleyball Club (Where I’m the strength and conditioning coach)

One of the questions we received was “What do you think of crossfit for my volleyball player?”

Well, as I’ve said before, I don’t like Crossfit for ANYTHING.  (But if you’re a consenting adult, you’re welcome to make your own bad decisions

But it’s time to point out a few of the problems with Crossfit that are SPECIFIC to volleyball players.

1) Volleyball isn’t an endurance sport.

Any volleyball player who trains by running anything more than 50 or 60 meter sprints is not only wasting their time, they’re ruining their volleyball performance.

I don’t know who said it first, but it’s well known by top strength and conditioning coaches that distance running “turns jumpers into joggers.”

Volleyball is a strength and power sport, NOT an aerobic sport.  Honestly, if your daughter is in shape enough to text her friends, she’s in good enough AEROBIC condition to play volleyball.

Here’s an example of a crossfit workout that would sap a volleyball player’s strength and power:

“Jerry”
For time:
Run 1 mile
Row 2K
Run 1 mile

Not only would this be a waste of time for anyone serious about volleyball, it would destroy hard-won fast twitch muscle fibers, promote fat storage, increase carbohydrate cravings, beat up joints, take inches off your vertical jump, promote illness, mess up hormones, shorten joint range of motion, and reduce explosiveness.

2) Crossfit is more random than a Pauly Shore movie.

No matter what you think about “muscle confusion” and “being ready for anything,” volleyball is a SPECIFIC sport and needs a specific workout.

Volleyball players get sport-specific injuries and asymmetries that can only be fixed with a SPECIFIC training program.

When a player comes in to see Dr. Russell because she has a glenohumeral internal rotation deficit, scapular dysfunctions, lack of stability, kyphosis, and a severe knee valgus, the last thing she should even think about doing is something like this:

Five rounds for time of:

• 5 Muscle-ups
• 135 pound Power clean, 10 reps
• Run 220 meters

Or:

• 35 Double-unders
• 95 pound Thrusters, 25 reps
• 15 Pull-ups

One of the core principles of success in anything is the idea of SPECIFICITY.

Crossfit is a mishmash of a bunch of systems.  To quote the legendary Charles Poliquin (on Crossfit): “Looked like a bunch of cachexic fitness-model wannabes searching for their souls in the weight room.”

Or, to paraphrase my Grandpa, you can’t ride two motorcycles when you only have one butt.

To get better at volleyball, you need a volleyball training program – not an epileptic writing fit of someone who has never actually trained anyone.

3) “Fatigue makes cowards of us all”

I have a rule about doing things RIGHT before you try to do them a lot.

If a volleyball player has a crappy serve, practicing that serve will just ingrain bad habits even more leading to injury and ineffective performance.

Lots of crossfit workouts have athletes doing complicated weighted exercises for a certain number of reps and trying for their lowest time.  Two bad things with this: 1) It encourages poor form and shortcuts 2) as they get tired, injury risk goes WAYYY up.

Poor exercise technique is bad for anyone, but volleyball players are even more injury prone than other athletes.  One in five competitive female athletes will suffer an ACL-based knee injury this season, 68% of female volleyball players will have some sort of shoulder injury this season.  The injury rate goes up when you factor in everything else that will go wrong too!  Thumbs, wrists, etc.

The goal with a volleyball strength and conditioning program is to 1) keep the girls on the court 2) improve performance.  In that order.

Racing to see who can get the most power cleans done is a sure recipe for injury.  Even more when you remember that we’re dealing with tired athletes who just want their workout over so they can get back to checking their facebook pages.

4) Leaving out the important stuff.

For the moment let’s forget that crossfit is totally inappropriate in exercise selection, loading, and volume – just focus on the fact that crossfit workouts leave out important injury prevention movements for volleyball players.

Volleyball players need a lot of hip mobility, thoracic spine mobility, scapular stability, anti-rotational core stability, anti-extension core strength, and lumbar stability.

If you waste all your time screwing around with nonsensical crossfit workouts, you won’t have any time, energy, or motivation left to pay attention to this stuff.

5) Volleyball shoulders aren’t normal shoulders.

Ok, when I was in college I actually dissected shoulders and spent a lot of time learning how everything works.  So believe me when I say that I’m VERY concerned when I hear about volleyball players doing crossfit.

It’s almost a cliche that after an experienced volleyball player serves, she grabs her shoulder.  Dr. Russell realigns shoulders daily at his practice.

Heck, I know a school bus full of 16 year-old volleyball players who have already gotten cortisol shots just to be able to finish playing the season.  It shouldn’t be like that way.

Here are some of the notes we made while talking about volleyball players and shoulders:  “Most have significant shoulder and full body laxity (aquired, congenital, and monthly hormonal), diminished rotator cuff strength in serving shoulder (especially with no rest all year), abnormal labral features, supraspinatus tears, inactive serratus anterior, jacked up scapular upward rotation, retroversion, and impingements.”

Basically, it goes back to the title of this section: Volleyball shoulders are nothing like regular shoulders.

Add in an imbalanced training program, poor posture, and improper form and I’m surprised that the number of shoulder injuries isn’t higher than 68%.

When scholarships are on the line, any coach who recommended crossfit for shoulders with all of these problems should be beaten to death with a folded-up ballcart.

With all 5 of these problems with crossfit in mind, I recommend that anyone looking to improve their volleyball performance find a REAL strength and conditioning coach, not just someone who paid $1000 bucks for a weekend seminar in destroying athletes.

As most of you know, in addition to running Wold Fitness Body Transformations, I am a youth sports performance specialist.

I work mainly with Capital City Volleyball Club as their head strength and conditioning coach, but consult with various schools districts and sports clubs as well.

Capital City asked me to develop a 5 minute Warm Up for all of the players to do before they even touch a volleyball.

Here’s what we came up with:

Capital City Volleyball Championship Warm Up

• Seal Jacks x 20 (40 sec) Temp Raise, chest stretch
• Mountain Climbers x 40 (80 sec) Temp Raise, hip loosener, core activation
• Fire Hydrants x 10/leg (110 sec) Glute activation, hip loosener
• Hindu Pushups x 10 (140 sec) Full body strength, posterior chain stretch
• Hip flexor stretch x 20sec/leg (180 sec) Releases the “brakes” on hip extension
• Glute bridges x 15 (210 sec) Glute activation/strength
• Piriformis Stretch x 20sec/leg (250 sec) Releases the “brakes” on jump & squat
• Tuck Jump x 10 (280 sec) Neural activation and explosiveness
• Bicycle Crunch x 20 (300 sec) Temp raise, core strength

(The time on the side is a running clock towards the 5 minutes)

Here are videos of each exercise:

Seal Jacks

Mountain Climbers (Volleyball Players do these without the sliders)

Fire Hydrants (first exercise in series)

Hindu Pushups

Hip Flexor Stretch

Glute Bridges

Piriformis Stretch

Tuck Jump

Bicycle Crunch