You know how your mom used to get you to do something that you didn’t like doing? For me, it was cleaning my room. I hated that as a kid… I don’t know why. Naturally, messy rooms aren’t great to live in, and my mom knew that. How did she get me to clean it? She tricked me by making it a game. She would get make it a game to see who could clean the section of the room the fastest. She knew I was a competitive young sprout, and she played that to her advantage. It worked like a charm for years.
Moral of the story? Sometimes kids just don’t wanna do something until YOU make it fun.
If I went around and interviewed 100 7-year-olds on what they think about the idea of “conditioning”, they would probably boo me out of recess. Not many kids are going to line up and jump up and down with excitement at the notion of running sprints and doing a big jog around the baseball field. What they will get excited for is being tricked into conditioning by making a game out of it. Here are some ideas you can do with your team, regardless of age. Heck, high schoolers would even want to do this!
Tips for conditioning
- Play some sort of game that they normally don’t. Things like dodgeball, capture the flag, relay races, etc. I would imagine most kids on a sports team would go nuts for any of these games and run harder and longer than they will at practice.
- Bring out your neighbors dog, give that dog a stick or something they love, they have the kids chase after the dog. Dogs love them a game of keep away, especially when they do the keeping. Dogs can run for a long time and they’re pretty elusive. The youth might have to come up with a game plan and strategize!
- Get you and the other coaches involved! Make it a game of coaches vs. players. It was always really cool whenever the coaches showed their fun side. Most youth coaches I had were intimidating to me, whether or not they meant to be. The thing that broke that barrier was them playing with us.
- Never use running as a punishment, especially in youth sports. This teaches kids that doing sprints is a negative, dreadful experience. Sprints, when done the right way, can be challenging but exciting.
- Remember that these little athletes are kids. They’re not trained to be like professional athletes. They’re not fully developed. They are not being paid to play a sport. Pushing kids too hard will discourage them from playing a sport, make them afraid of you, and may take away the simple joy that youth sports should be.
- Don’t be afraid to make it fun. We trick ourselves into thinking, “Well, conditioning for me as a kid was miserable and I hated every minute of it, especially when Coach Pete would yell at us and make us all feel terrible. Yeah… I should do the same to my kids!” Let us be the new age of helping kids fall in love with sports and training their bodies by making it fun. Just because it’s fun doesn’t mean it can’t be challenging! Find that balance and do your best to maintain it.
In my humble opinion, the emphasis of youth sports shouldn’t be winning championships or destroying your crosstown rivals. These are fun perks, but we adults tend to get waaayyyy too caught up in sports in general, let alone youth sports with 6-year-olds playing soccer. The best coaches are the ones who help their kids love sports, to enjoy exercising and to help them get more coordinated and talented as well as improve as individuals and as a team. If conditioning doesn’t accomplish the latter, then it’s being taken too seriously, and you need to take it back a little bit. Conditioning should be fun, natural, and exciting!
Keep it simple and you’ll do great, coach.
