Why Ages 8–14 Matter
And What Most Programs Miss
Most competitive young athletes are stuck in First Gear. This is the explanation, and the window to do something about it.
She’s 11. She’s tall for her age. She’s been on competitive teams since she was eight.
Maybe the speed is there, trapped inside a body that can’t access it. She runs like she’s driving with the brakes on, covering ground, working hard, but nothing looks effortless. Nothing looks explosive. Coaches have always said she has “good speed potential.” But it never quite shows up the way you’d expect.
Or maybe it’s something else. In warm-ups she looks great. Long strides. Powerful. But somewhere around the second half, the third shift, when the body starts rationing, something changes. The legs look heavier. The first step disappears. Kids who were slower in warm-ups are now beating her to the ball. She looks like a different athlete.
“Why doesn’t it show up when it matters?”
That’s the question I hear most. It comes out different ways — from hockey parents, soccer parents, ringette parents, lacrosse parents, basketball parents — but it’s always the same thing underneath. Their athlete is working. The results aren’t there. And nobody has been able to say why.
I’ve been watching this pattern for over twenty years. First in Olympic programs in China, now at Jungle Athletics in Calgary. And after all of it, I can tell you: the answer isn’t effort. It isn’t talent. It isn’t more practice or more ice time.
The answer is a concept called First Gear. And a window between ages 8 and 14 in which it can actually be fixed.
This is my attempt to explain both.
First Gear
I can usually see it in the first ten minutes.
The athlete comes in moving with real effort. Their brain is telling their legs to go. Their arms are pumping. Everything looks like trying hard. But there’s a tell that shows up every time, regardless of sport or age: the arms and the legs aren’t connected. The body is producing a lot of noise and not much speed. Lots of effort, not much output.
This is First Gear. And most competitive young athletes — even good ones, even ones who’ve been in structured programs for years — are still in it.
First Gear isn’t a talent problem. It isn’t an effort problem. It’s a foundation problem. The movement system hasn’t been built yet. The athlete is running on hardware that was never organized, and no amount of practice in their sport changes that, because their sport doesn’t address it.
In my experience it shows up in two distinct ways. Both feel different to a parent watching from the stands. Both trace back to the same missing foundation.
The first brake: force is leaking at the ground.
Your athlete’s feet and ankles are the only point of contact with the playing surface. During sprints, cuts, jumps, and landings, the foot-ankle complex handles forces three to eight times body weight. The arches, the Achilles-calf complex, the small intrinsic muscles: natural springs.
When those springs work properly, energy goes into the ground and comes back as propulsion. When they don’t: when the ankles are stiff, the arches aren’t loading, the foot can’t do its job. Your athlete absorbs impact instead of redirecting it. Every stride costs more than it should. The engine might be there. The transmission isn’t.
That’s what “brakes on” means at the ground level. And it’s almost never what anyone is looking at.
Hockey and ringette players are especially vulnerable here. Rigid skate boots compress the foot into a fixed position for years: no splay, no arch movement, no ankle mobility. The body writes compensations upstream: tight hips, knee pain, mysteriously sore backs. The issue is almost always further down.
The second brake: the pelvis isn’t holding.
Most people assume speed lives in the legs. But the legs can only express what the trunk allows.
Think of a stationary bike. The reason you can transfer force from your legs into the pedals is that the crankshaft is completely stable. Nothing flexes. Nothing spills. Every bit of energy goes where you intend it. Your athlete’s core has to function the same way. When it doesn’t, when the pelvis tilts and the soup bowl spills, the body finds stability somewhere else. It borrows from the arms. It borrows from the shoulders. The arms and legs stop coordinating because they’re no longer working off the same stable base.
That’s the tell I see in the first ten minutes. That’s what “arms and legs not connected” actually means.
The principle behind this is called DNS — Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization. Before force can travel through the body efficiently, the center has to hold. Without it, athletes leak energy at the hips on every stride, every cut, every push. The athlete whose back tightens in the third period, whose hips seem to rise during a sprint. That’s usually not a fitness problem. It’s a stability problem. It looks like fatigue. It isn’t.
Read more: Why I Didn’t Fix the Hamstring →
“Lots of effort, not much output. The arms and legs aren’t connected. That’s First Gear — and it has nothing to do with talent.”
— Greg Almon, Jungle Athletics CalgaryParents describe the downstream effects without realizing they’re connected: good games followed by bad ones, high-effort weeks with nothing to show, physical ability that comes and goes. When the foundation isn’t stable, performance is inconsistent by definition. The body is constantly borrowing from itself, and you can’t borrow from yourself indefinitely.
What I tell parents at this stage: this is fixable. It is not a character problem. It is not a talent ceiling. It is a foundation problem, and foundation problems have a specific solution. The only question is whether they get addressed during the window that makes them easiest to solve.
When Speed Becomes Inaccessible
The second version of First Gear looks different at first glance. The athlete isn’t stiff. In warm-ups, they look genuinely good, long strides, powerful. Then the second half starts and something changes.
The instinct is to call it a fitness problem. More laps. More conditioning. Push harder. This is almost always wrong.
The nervous system runs on its own kind of energy, and speed is the most expensive thing it produces. When that neural battery drains, the fast, explosive programs are the first thing to get cut. What’s left is an athlete who looks slower, stiffer, and less sharp, not because they’re tired in the traditional sense, but because the system has shut down access to the expensive stuff. The speed is still there. The body just can’t reach it anymore.
Think of your athlete like a phone battery. When it’s full, everything works: apps are fast, the screen is bright, the camera is instant. As it drains, the phone starts shutting things down. Not because the hardware broke. Because the system is conserving what’s left. Your athlete’s nervous system works exactly the same way. Speed is the most expensive program running. It’s the first thing that gets cut when the battery runs low.
“Speed doesn’t disappear when an athlete is tired. It becomes inaccessible.”
— Greg Almon, Jungle Athletics CalgaryHere’s what that looks like at home. Picture your athlete coming down the stairs on a good morning. There’s a bounce. They hop the last step. They’re loose, wasting energy on small unnecessary movements. Everything looks easy.
Now picture a different morning. The hood is up. Breakfast is picked at. Answers are one word. At training, the warm-ups are mechanical. Nothing looks dangerous, but nothing looks sharp. That’s not laziness. That’s a drained battery. And once you start seeing it, you can’t unsee it. There’s a lot more to how we manage it.
Most kids in First Gear are dealing with one of these two problems: leaking force at the ground, or running out of neural battery. Often both at the same time. Each one makes the other worse. That’s why fixing game speed requires looking at the whole system, not just the legs.
The Window That Doesn’t Wait
This is the part I spend the most time explaining to parents. Because once you understand it, everything else makes sense. And if you’re early enough to do something about it, almost everyone does.
Think of development like a highway. You’re driving forward and time is passing whether you want it to or not. Along the way, there are exits. Each one leads to a different motor quality: coordination, speed, mechanics, strength. Take the exit at the right time and you build roads, wiring the nervous system in ways that compound for years. Miss the exit and you can’t go back and get the same rate of return.
Between ages 8 and 14, those exits are open. The nervous system is unusually responsive. Motor patterns laid down during this window become structural. They compound across sports. They become the raw material that everything athletic is eventually built on top of.
After 14, that process doesn’t stop, but it slows down significantly. The difference is the difference between building and patching. At 8 through 14, you’re building. At 16 or 17, you’re patching. Patching works. But it never produces what building would have, and it costs far more time and effort for far smaller returns.
Always plastic. Compounds forever. Every sport, every surface adds to the library. The one quality that never fully closes. It adapts fastest now.
The nervous system learns fast-twitch patterns most efficiently before adolescence. Once it matures, the rate of return drops sharply.
Acceleration, deceleration, direction change: installed now, they become structural. At 16 they’re rebuilt from scratch. Much harder. Much slower.
Expresses best post-puberty. Building too early consumes developmental bandwidth that belongs to coordination and speed. This is a sequencing error, not a commitment problem.
Coordination is always trainable. It compounds for life. But speed, the quality that most separates athletes in actual games, has a narrow window. And most youth programs spend that window on the wrong things.
Sport practice builds sport skill. But without athletic development: speed mechanics, foundational stability, landing and deceleration skill. Many athletes hit a physical ceiling that limits what their sport coaching can ever unlock.
This is not meant to create panic. It’s meant to create clarity. And clarity is good news, because if your athlete is between 8 and 14 right now, the window isn’t closing. It’s open. This is the moment.
I came back from China in 2010 with seven Olympic gold medals on the program I’d been part of, and a methodology I’d spent four years proving in one of the most competitive training environments on earth. Jungle Athletics had humble beginnings after that. A small space. Minimal equipment. Word of mouth.
In China I’d been given everything: the best athletes, the best staff, all the time in the world. What I discovered in that small space is that a video camera, a flywheel, and a stopwatch were the only three things that mattered anyway.
The city was industrial and grey. Cold in a way that gets into the building with you. The oval was old and run down and I walked in and looked at the athletes and I knew immediately: they were overtrained. You could see it in their posture, the way they stood, the way they moved around the ice. Everything about them said exhausted, not tired from today but tired from a long time of being pushed past what the system could absorb.
I stood there thinking: how am I supposed to make this team better?
I gave them a week off. The administrator thought I was out of my mind. The technical coach thought I was out of my mind. Everyone thought I was out of my mind.
But when I told the athletes, something changed in the room. Not excitement — something quieter. Relief. And underneath the relief, something that looked like trust. Because they had all felt it in their bodies for months and nobody had said it out loud. I had walked in, looked at them for ten minutes, and said: I see it. I see what you’re carrying.
Those athletes would have run through a wall for me after that. Not because I was a great coach. Because the body tells the truth — and I was willing to look at it.
That lesson runs every session at Jungle. Before we ever ask how fast they are, we ask how charged the system is. A session that looks light on paper can be the most expensive session of the month if the athlete arrives drained. After a tournament weekend, a growth spurt, a rough week of sleep, the program doesn’t know that. A coach who reads the athlete does.
That small space became a studio. The studio became the facility we have now. The methodology hasn’t changed. We organize the body before we load it. We read the athlete before we program them. We never mistake effort for readiness.
Read the full story: Best in the World — From Olympic Gold to Raising Unbreakable Youth Athletes in Calgary →
What Actually Fixes First Gear
Three things. In this order. Skip one and the whole system breaks down.
We read the athlete before we program them. Every session starts with an assessment, not a formal one with clipboards, just twenty years of pattern recognition. Posture. Ground contact. Rhythm. Engagement. We adjust every session based on where the athlete actually is, not where the program says they should be. This is why Jungle athletes don’t burn out, and why the progress sticks.
We organize the body before we load it. This is the sentence I say most. Every athlete at Jungle has one or two exercises designed specifically for them, targeting the weak link in their chain. Most young athletes have lost the ability to hinge, squat, or rotate properly, not because they’re weak, but because the foundation was never built. We find the gap. We fix it first. Then we build on it.
We film everything. Video analysis, every session. We show athletes exactly what their body is doing, where the inefficiency lives, and what the correction looks like. When a kid sees their own movement on screen, something clicks that coaching cues alone can never achieve. The athlete becomes a student of themselves. That’s when things start to change fast.
You won’t find rows of bench presses at Jungle. Our gym is built around flywheel-based equipment that teaches athletes to produce force while standing, exactly like they do in competition. In every sport, force comes from the feet. We train the whole chain from the ground up, including the lower leg and foot complex that almost every other program ignores entirely.
What the Window Looks Like When You Use It
These aren’t the only athletes we’ve built. They’re just the ones who let us tell their stories.
Summer & Brynn Masikewich
Basketball · Team Canada · NCAA Division IThey were 13 and 15 when they walked in. Tall, but stiff, basketball brains trapped in bodies that couldn’t express what they already knew. Years later, one was a five-year university starter, Defensive Player of the Year, and national champion at the University of Saskatchewan. The other was a four-star recruit to UCLA and is now playing professionally in Europe. Neither outcome was visible on day one. What was visible was that nobody had ever built the foundation.
Read their full story →Deacon Sterna
Football · UBC Thunderbirds · Canada West Rookie of the YearHe was 15, had just been cut from AAA hockey, and couldn’t hold an eight-second plank. We told him: forget the skates, you’re playing football. Four years of foundation work in the right order. He finished his final year of high school as a two-way starter on a provincial-playoff team, walked on campus at 220 lbs, started every game as a true freshman defensive end, and was named Canada West Rookie of the Year. The whole thing started in First Gear.
Read his full story →The Question I Get Asked Most
A parent finishes reading all of this and does the mental math on their athlete’s age. Then they ask: “Are we too late?”
Almost certainly not. But the window is not infinite, and this information is only useful if something is done with it while it still matters.
Coordination is always trainable. That window never fully closes. Speed, mechanics, movement skill: all of it has a rate of return that peaks earlier than most parents realize and doesn’t come back at the same rate. Knowing that doesn’t mean you’ve lost. It means you have something specific to do, starting now, with a clear understanding of what you’re building and why.
“If your athlete is between 8 and 14 right now, the window isn’t closing. It’s open. This is the moment.”
— Greg Almon, Jungle Athletics CalgaryThe Free Athlete Analysis is 60 minutes. Bring your athlete. We’ll watch them move, tell you which stage they’re in, what’s limiting them, and what we’d prioritize building. No sales pressure. No generic program pitch. A real look at where they stand and what’s actually available to them right now.
This guide covers the what and the why. The Development System page goes further: four stages, in sequence, with the complete framework Greg uses to build every athlete who walks in. First Gear. The Harbin story. Another Gear. Violent Grace. The Arizona track. Why the order matters more than the effort.
Read the Development System →