Today we will discuss some few pieces of Advice for young children to be successful in swimming or Any other sports. First of all, in my believing as a coach the parents have More Control on their Kids more than us and with few tips that we will discuss in this Article will help you to understand More About Sport, Specially Swimming.
you need to know that building a successful Swimmer or an Athlete in Any Sport Take time. so Accept that progress in any sport takes at least 7 -10 years after puberty in most sports for any athlete to achieve their full potential.
Also, you need to know that
• success at a younger age does not guarantee success later in an athletes’ career.
• And in fact, there may be an indication that the reverse is true because the swimmers are not brought along slowly and because coaches didn’t teach them good technique, but, instead, they simply worked them harder than other coaches at a younger age.
• The goal is not maximal performance but maximal development at each stage of the biological age of the athlete.
• Short-term success usually results in long-term disappointments.
• Approximately 80% of age group (10 – 14 years old) champions are not successful as senior or national swimmers. More success was achieved by those who take a longer term approach.
• It is far more important to bring swimmers along gradually so they don’t burn out mentally and so they can improve relative to their peers as they get older. This is what I call, Long Term Athlete Development or LTAD.
WHAT IS LTAD?
Long Term Athlete Development is about achieving optimal training, competition and recovery throughout an athlete’s career, particularly in relation to the important growth and development years of young children, adolescents, age group swimmers.
Scientific research has identified that it takes at least 10 years, or 10,000 hours for talented
athletes to achieve sporting excellence. There are no short cuts!
This LTAD program was produced and applied in many countries around the world. They have
been adopted and grown in programs and countries like the USA, Canada, UK, Australia,
Scotland, Hungary and Italy and many other countries and associations, like the ASA Technical
Swimming Committee “ASA”.
In the Middle East and the Arabian Gulf, we try to educate and develop coaches, parents and
even sports federations to put these ideas and programs into our systems so coaches and
administrators will take a long-term approach to help develop better athletes.
There are many types of LTAD frameworks. Some programs are split into six categories,
sometimes into seven, but the common arrangement is five categories
This graphic shows the ASA framework for the STAGES OF OPTIMAL TRAINABILITY (Balyi and
Hamilton, 1999).