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If you can’t count, you can’t add. If you can’t throw, you can’t play a number of sports…
Physical Literacy is a key concept behind the Canadian Sport for Life model for both competitive excellence and long-term wellness in activity and sport.
Some of Canada’s greatest athletes are prime examples of physical literacy in action. Here are a few famous Canadian athletes who didn’t specialize too early in one sport or activity, but leveraged their fundamental skills from one pursuit to another:
Steve Nash is a superstar NBA basketball player, but he was also an accomplished soccer, hockey and baseball player as a teen. He didn’t start playing basketball until he was 12 or 13 years old!
Hockey’s Great One, Wayne Gretzky, was a star player in both youth lacrosse and baseball. Throughout his career, he was also famous for the childlike joy he took in playing, despite being recognized as a supreme ‘competitor’.
Marquee MLB baseball player Corey Koskie played Junior-A hockey with the Selkirk Steelers, and he was also a star volleyball player at the University of Manitoba before he committed to baseball full-time.
Baseball great Matt Stairs excelled in hockey as a youth, and today he coaches youth hockey during the Major League Baseball off-season.
Monitoring Peak Height Velocity (PHV)
Kids ‘mature’ at different rates & it makes a big difference
One of the key elements in applying LTAD principles to physical activities and sports programs is the recognition that an athlete’s or dancer’s chronological or ‘calendar’ age does not necessarily reflect their actual developmental age – physical or mental. We all know kids ‘mature’ at different rates with their bodies, and their developmental age will determine how they should train and practice their activity or sport. This is why CS4L recommends that sport clubs, dance schools and any organization that deals with active children regularly measure and monitor the physical maturation and growth of their young participants. The most important stage of monitoring PHV, otherwise known as the adolescent growth spurt, is the onset of the spurt and the peak of the spurt.
Figure 1. Maturity Events in Girls (Modified after Ross et al. 1977)
PHV in girls occurs at about 12 years of age. Usually the first physical sign of adolescence is breast budding, which occurs slightly after the onset of the growth spurt. Shortly thereafter, pubic hair begins to grow. Menarche, or the onset of menstruation, comes rather late in the growth spurt, occurring after PHV is achieved. The sequence of developmental events may normally occur 2 or even more years earlier or later than average.
Figure 2. Maturity Events in Boys (Modified after Ross et al. 1977)
PHV in boys is more intense than in girls and on average occurs about 2 years later. Growth of the testes, pubic hair, and penis are related to the maturation process. Peak Strength Velocity (PSV) comes a year or so after PHV. Thus, there is pronounced late gain in strength characteristics of the male athlete. As with girls, the developmental sequence for male athletes may occur 2 or more years earlier or later than average. Early maturing boys may have as much as a 4-year physiological advantage over their late-maturing peers. Eventually, the late maturers will catch up when they experience their growth spurt.
PHV is the fastest rate of growth during the adolescent growth spurt. By initially detecting it and then consistently monitoring it, instructors and coaches can track the growth and physical maturation process in children and youth with whom they work. How can you reliably detect and measure the progress of PHV? The technical word for it is kinathropometry.
Kinathropometry is the process of measuring human size, proportion, and maturation. According to W.D. Ross, W.D. and M.J. Marfell-Jones, “It puts the individual athlete into objective focus and provides clear appraisal of his or her structural status at any given time, or more importantly, provides for quantification of differential growth and training influences.” Typically, basic kinathropometry for PHV uses measurements of standing height, sitting height, and arm length.
These measurements can be taken at regular intervals through childhood into adolescence and charted on graphs to draw “growth velocity” curves over time. To assess how typical a young athlete is for his or her age, the measurements are then compared with each other, to identify early, average and late maturers.
Figure 3. Maturation in Girls and Boys
Figure 3. Maturation in Girls and Boys
And if instructors and coaches know this information, they can then determine the best training practices for their level of physical development and maturation.
Why the fuss? What difference do the training methods make?
Simply put, a child who is 12 years old according to their birth date may possess a biological age of anywhere from 9 to 15 years. The difference between a 9-year-old and a 15-year-old is huge, yet participants and athletes with this disparate range of physical maturation are often trained the same way and participate in the same age group competitions. As a result, problems often emerge with physical injuries, and the early maturers (especially males) often experience a huge advantage in performance and elite selection. Also when coaches know the developmental age they can adjust training for stamina, strength and speed consistent with the ‘sensitive periods of trainability’.
For these reasons, sport coaches and activity instructors should identify and monitor the developmental age of the youth with whom they work, and their organizations should look at creating appropriate training and competition schedules for each of the developmental ages and stages. This will better address the needs of the early, average and late maturers. And in the long-term it will produce better athletes and dancers, while reducing drop-out due to injury, fatigue and frustration.
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Changing sport in Canada one step at a time
Canadian Sport for Life (CS4L) is alive and kicking in British Columbia – and jumping, throwing and skipping! Through 2010 LegaciesNow, the BC agency tasked with promoting CS4L in the buildup to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, the BC government is helping Provincial Sports Organizations (PSOs), Disability Sport Provincial Sport Organizations (DS PSOs) and Multi Sport Organizations (MSOs) evaluate how they can effectively adopt the seven LTAD stages at all levels in their sport, from schools and community recreation all the way to high performance.
“We’ve taken on the task of assisting with implementation of Canadian Sport for Life in BC,” says Drew Mitchell, Project Manager for BC-CS4L at 2010 LegaciesNow. “Funding has been put in place for us to work with seventeen PSOs in the first wave of implementation.”
Funding and assistance is being provided through grants to PSOs, DS PSOs and MSOs to review their own ‘sport systems’ to see what implementation work needs to happen where, ranging from schools to clubs to national training centres. This includes assistance with management tools to perform system audits of each organization’s programs.
“We’re helping them move from a glossy CS4L document sitting on a bookshelf to implementing it down through member sports clubs to the community level,” says Drew. “We help them plan their implementation using the LTAD framework developed by their NSO, starting with an audit of their current programs and a gap analysis.”
LegaciesNow has also focused on three additional areas: partnerships, geography, and disabilities.
“The first issue we’ve asked them to look at is how well are you working with other sports?” says Drew. “That is, how can your sport make a horizontal grab from other sports to enhance the development of your own?” Drew gives the example of 6 year olds going directly into a single formal sport, when maybe a general run-jump-throw program might better enhance their all-round development at that young age. Another example might be soccer teams at older ages working with track & field coaches to develop complementary traits in fitness and agility.
The geography issue concerns the sheer size of BC, and the limited access that many smaller and remote communities have to sport programs. Sport organizations need to look at the effectiveness of their distribution and delivery of programs around the province. Meanwhile, the disability emphasis focuses on providing suitable programs for athletes with disabilities and partnering with existing sport disability groups to maximize the potential and delivery for all the sport organizations involved.
Drew says the ‘horizontal grab’ between sports is a marvelous opportunity given the deficit of physical education specialists in most elementary schools across BC and the rest of Canada, as this is the optimal age range for developing general physical literacy in youth. “The FUNdamentals stage is probably the most vulnerable of the seven stages because of the lack of PE specialists,” says Drew. “It’s not going to be fixed further down the chain, so the physical literacy component is going to be very important and we’re going to put some emphasis on that. The schools have a significant role in the developmental stage of sport, but one of the greatest difficulties is that almost all of the provinces have taken the PE specialists out of the elementary school.”
Among BC-CS4L’s various implementation tools, they are also looking to create a matrix that recreation centres can use to see where their programs fit within the seven stages of LTAD. But some elementary challenges always remain.
“Our challenges are taking the time to do it,” says Drew. “Organizations getting their people together, doing the planning, and moving forward. And we understand that this is going to be a 4-5 year process – this is not going to happen overnight.”
If you would like to learn more about 2010 LegaciesNow and initiatives to promote CS4L in BC, you can contact Drew Mitchell at dmitchell@2010legaciesnow.com.
Long-Term Player Development - Inclusion from first kicks
Joel MacDonald is a man with a mission and mandate. As the Technical Director for the Kanata Soccer Club outside Ottawa, Joel came into his job with the stated purpose of implementing CS4L principles into the club’s programs.
“I first learned about the Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) concept while doing my masters at UBC,” says Joel. “Just as I finished my Masters paper in human kinetics in 1996, a paper about LTAD came out in BC Sports Coach written by Istvan Balyi and Richard Way, and I thought, ‘D’oh! I wish that had been around when I started my masters!’”
Joel has been talking to people about long term development for twelve years, and he says it was one of the factors that played heavily in his hiring as Technical Director at Kanata in 2005.
“I said right off the bat that this is what I wanted to do,” says Joel. “It turned out to be one of the solidifying factors in my hiring, because it made me different from the other applicants. The Club and the Board of Directors have been great – they’ve been behind this from the get-go, so I’ve been very fortunate compared to some of the places I’ve been where it hasn’t taken off.”
For soccer clubs to adopt the CS4L long-term concepts, otherwise known as Long-Term Player Development (LTPD) in its soccer-specific adaptation, Joel says one of the typical challenges has been that people are really just concerned with getting kids on the soccer field right NOW. It’s often a big stretch within volunteer organizations to look any farther ahead. Meanwhile, Joel sees the introduction of CS4L at Kanata as a 15-year process.
“I’ve broken our implementation into three five-year cycles, and we’re in the midst of year three of our first cycle right now. In two more years, we’ll review the program to see how everything has worked.”
At Kanata, Joel started making changes at the grassroots level, starting with kids born in 1998 or later. Every season, their program changes in accordance with the stages defined in the LTPD pathway, including grouping players according to developmental age and physical maturation versus chronological age. It hasn’t been easy convincing some of the club parents of the benefits of CS4L.
“Trying to get information out to the membership is the biggest challenge,” says Joel. “People ask, ‘Why are you doing this? I want a competitive league for my four- year-old with jerseys with numbers on them.’”
“There’s also the challenge of getting people out of the exclusion mentality and into the inclusion model. When you have 60 kids coming out of U-9 and you’re cutting the group to 30 because we only need that many players, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot because we’re going to need that pool of players. Instead, you get coaches saying, ‘Sorry, you don’t fit in, because you’re not going to help us win a championship title.’ Now we’re treating kids the way they should be treated, and we focus on winning at the older ages. I’ve got coaches and parents starting to see the benefits of this approach.”
Joel says his own coaching experiences as a young player have helped direct him to the CS4L philosophy. He struggled to learn the game and basic technique, often feeling bewildered by the soccer lexicon used by his coaches.
“I had a British fellow coaching me in my first year or two, and I don’t remember much about it other than he was British,” recounts Joel. “Then I had a Hungarian guy coach me for a while, and I remember him always saying, ‘Let the ball do the work,’ but at that age I had no clue what he was talking about.”
“I don’t think I got my best coaching until I was 15, and that was my high school coach who taught me the basic concepts of the game. The majority of what I learned about soccer was the two years I spent with him, but that was kind of late to be learning the basics.”
While his struggle inhibited his development as a youth player, it has proven to be a help to his coaching years later. “It’s a credit to everything I do in my coaching today, because nothing was easy for me as a kid,” says Joel. “I had to learn how to break it all down and learn the game. For me, that’s one of the benefits – I find it that much easier to relate to the people I’m coaching.”
Joel is helping to pioneer CS4L in Canadian soccer. If you would like to contact Joel to learn more, you can reach him at (613) 836-5787
How LTAD inspired training techniques lead to sporting success
When Alain was hired as Technical Director of FNQ Fédération Natation de Quebec (Quebec Swimming) he was given carte blanche to revitalize a stagnant swimming program. Following his implementation of Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) practices after year 2000, the first wave of Quebec swimmers from the revised program are now racking up successes nationally and internationally.
Lefebvre undertook a pilot project to implement LTAD-based swim practices in 80 swim clubs throughout the province after a year of on-the-ground research. This included dramatic changes to the competition structure for younger swimmers. “The system was an important part of the problem,” explains Alain. “You can make improvements to coaching, but success will be limited if the system works against your goals.”
What was done?
LTAD is a framework that defines the sporting experience in stages based on chronological age and physiological age. At younger ages, these are defined as Active Start, Fundamentals, Learn to Train. As an athlete enters the teen years and progresses in a sport, the stages keep pace with their development in the Train to Train, Train to Compete and Train to Win stages.
“As everyone knows intuitively, a developing child has evolving capabilities, physical and mental,” explains Richard Way, Canadian Sport for Life Project Leader. “Yet traditionally sport competition does not consider this.”
While adult swimmers win by going from one end of the pool to another in the shortest time, this doesn’t mean that children and youth should use the same measure of success. Indeed a winning result is a process of doing many things well: a start, a stroke, a turn and a finish. All require different technical abilities, and yet these specifics are often overlooked in early training. Changing the measure of success to encourage correct technique for young swimmers has been key to Quebec Swimming’s success.
In Quebec prior to 2002, swimmers had to achieve a time standard by the age of 11 to be eligible to compete in a race. Achieving this standard encouraged young swimmers to focus on a single stroke and discouraged learning other strokes. Both swimmers and parents would complain about practicing other strokes because the competition structure rewarded those who swam fast in one category. This early specialization inhibited the mastery of different swim techniques at the best window of trainability – when swimmers are young children.
In 2002 FQN changed their competition structure. At the beginner’s level, instead of timing a 100m race, the competition was broken down into a series of important technical skills. Swimmers would compete on time to complete turns, the number of strokes plus time over duration, kicking, and their start times. This encouraged swimmers to improve the important swimming skills in the Learn to Train stage, which is the optimal window of trainability for skill development. Today FQN has norms for each of these skill sets and can measure performance against provincial norms to provide bronze, silver or gold for certain results.
The result is that swimmers win while learning crucial techniques to become better swimmers. Another upside: there are more opportunities to win, and even if your turns are shaky, your starts might win you a medal – a big plus for a young swimmer!
Today, no 100m races exist in Quebec for swimmers 12 and under – swim racers do 50m races which are shorter, less tiring and emphasize speed. They also swim 200m, 400m, 800 and 1500m events, which develop aerobic qualities better suited for their physiological development at that stage. Results now show performance of 100m when they are older hasn’t suffered at all despite no one racing this distance when they’re young.
When a swimmer reaches 14 years old, time standards become required to race but the only way to achieve the standard is through the 200m Individual Medley (IM) - an event with four different strokes & turns - and 200m freestyle or 400 IM and 400 freestyle. This requires swimmers to develop well-rounded swimming skills and allows both fast twitch swimmers (muscles which make you go fast) and aerobic swimmers (muscles which help you to go far) a chance for success.
At 15 years of age, swimmers can now focus on a single stroke but even then, after they’ve raced ‘their race’, a swimmer can also enter whatever event they want to swim at the swim meet.
Overcoming resistance
In his first year on the job, Alain and Claude Picard visited each of Quebec’s 80 swim clubs twice. In his second year (April 2001), Alain held a series of meetings with coaches of the 11 regions (8-15 coaches per region). These sessions introduced the future rule changes according to the LTAD principles for the following September. While all the coaches agreed with the LTAD principles, the proposed rule changes were controversial. In the end the proposed competition structure was implemented by all regions with the proviso that it be reviewed and open for changes the following year. Each year thereafter, the 100+ coaches regrouped, again by region, and made some changes, as they have every year since to improve implementation. But the key modifications remain.
“In a democratic society the only way to make a change is to modify the competitive structure to change behavior” Orjan Madsen, Sport Physiologist
The results?
Those young ‘guinea pigs’ who began the pilot project in 2002 are now 17 year old junior athletes. In the final quarter of 2007, six of those juniors produced top 10 (provincial – national – international) performances according to the FINA point system. The changes in training to facilitate broad-based swimming techniques is resulting in single athletes beating provincial records in more than one stroke and some athletes up to four strokes.
After implementing a LTAD approach to swimming, Quebec has had a dramatic improvement in performance. In the 1990s swimmers annually set about 10 to 25 new provincial age group records. 2001 was the province’s best year with 39 records broken. Now as the ‘young guinea pigs’ race in age groups, the records are being broken at an unprecedented rate: 65 provincial records were set in 2005, 91 in 2006, 87 in 2007 and this year the first three months have seen 47 new records!
At the next level, Quebec has traditionally made up about 10-15% of the national team. With the LTAD generation now reaching maturity, the province now makes up 25% of Canada’s team. And the future looks even brighter as last year Quebec swimmers set seven new national records and in the first two months of 2008 they set another nine new national records.
“Quebec athletes have a tradition of being strong sprinters,” points out Alain. “Now they’re breaking records at longer distances – the 200m and 400m.”
There’s more
The changes are also bolstering membership. For 15 years provincial membership has been stable; now it increases 2-4% every year, and while Alain isn’t sure, he suspects the increase is partly from a reduced number of lapsed members. Perhaps a new format for swim meets in Quebec is a factor. A meet now cannot exceed 5 hours – a relief for parents and swimmers who used to spend hours poolside waiting for a single race.
What’s next?
Alain is surveying his national level coaches to identify the non-technical skills that gifted athletes need to be successful on the international scene. “The first time they experience jet lag should not be on their way to a World Cup nor should it be the first time they are coached by a different person,” explains Alain. “These are all experiences they need to be successful.” As well, for some Quebec athletes, English instructions on the pool deck is a stressor contributing to poor performances. Alain encourages billeting at meets outside of Quebec so athletes can become more comfortable with English in a friendly environment.
While many sports in Canada are just beginning to implement changes based on LTAD, FNQ is seeing the results of their changes 7 years ago. Their early leadership and commitment to LTAD in training and competition has vaulted them ahead as national leaders in Canada’s emerging international success in swimming!
2008 Board Resoluation
Canadian Sport for Life/Long-Term Athlete Development
Canadian Sport for Life (CS4L) is a guide to improve the quality of sport in Canada. In 2005 it was approved by the Federal, Provincial and Territorial Ministers of Sport as the Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) model for Canada. The same Ministers approved its Provincial and Territorial implementation in 2007. Currently all 56 Sport Canada funded national sport organizations have either developed, or are developing, a sport specific LTAD. Meanwhile BC, through 2010 Legacies Now, is working with PSOs, MSOs and agencies from other sectors to bring CS4L to life in this province.
Because of its inherent simplicity and vision of sport as a life long activity, CS4L is bringing groups together within the sporting community, but also reaching beyond typical boundaries. Municipal recreation leaders, educators and provincial sport administrators are sitting together to align their common goals.
LTAD is a seven stage model based on the physical, mental, emotional and cognitive development of children and adolescents. Each stage reflects a different point in a participant’s development. The first three of seven stages in the LTAD encourage physical literacy, fundamental movement and sport skills as well as sport for all. The next three stages focus on excellence. The final stage encourages life-long physical activity.
Whereas:
Leaders in the recreation and parks community recognize the role of sport and physical activity in building and sustaining communities across our province
Whereas:
LTAD is an inclusive model that encourages individuals to get involved in lifelong physical activity.
Whereas:
CS4L promotes connecting and integrating physical education programs in the school system with sport organization and recreation programs in the community.
Therefore be it resolved that:
BCRPA acknowledge and support the CS4L/LTAD model which embraces the sector’s approach to physical literacy and activity for life and provides a new framework for community sport development in BC.
