Defining Traits

One of the things that your young athlete can do to help them stand out is to focus on what I call Defining Traits. A Defining Trait is something distinctive about your athlete. Something that makes them stand out or illustrates how they're different. Earlier in the week I had a discussion with a Mom of one of our Trial Athletes. A Trial Athlete is someone that is taking a test drive of our program. They try us out and we try them out. We see if its a good fit on both ends. During the conversation Defining Traits came up and I asked her about it. She told me that her son was fast.  Really fast, but he would run out of energy during games.

Speed is her son's Defining Trait.

What she was looking for was more stamina.

Now here is the thing.

I remember having the exact same discussion with a sports scientist in China about 12 years ago. Yu Feng Tong was a super powerful 5'5", 170 lbs of fast twitch muscles that happened to be a Speed Skater. I asked him one time to describe a 500 meter race. He told me...that after the first 200 meters he felt like he was going to die. Back to my discussion with the Sports Scientist...

Me: He can already squat 500 lbs....lets add more conditioning.

Sports Scientist: If we give him too much conditioning we will kill what makes him fast.

We settled on a program of where he would maintain his maximum strength and we would add more aerobic work in small increments over time.  This formula would allow the "pollution pathways of the muscle" to improve and would add more mitochondria (energy factories of the muscle). We tried it for two years and the next time I asked Yu Feng Tong how the 500 meter race felt he told me...After the first 350 meters he felt he was going to die.

See? Improvement.

The point of course is that you can never ignore what made you good in the first place. 

Don't ignore it, and don't let it degrade.  Its your Defining Trait.

It's why your good.

Just add to it. 

Slowly.

Over time.

Dedicated to your athletes success

Greg