Coordination plyometrics exercises for youth development

As children grow, muscle coordination develops with everyday play and activities. Fine motor skills that allow a child to hold a spoon, pencil and color within the lines comes slowly but surely.

Coordination also gives children the ability to complete more complex tasks such as riding a bike, kicking a ball or participating in team sports. All children develop at different speeds, but parents can help this progress with simple activities and exercises.

Games present the optimal way to teach a child coordination skills. Games and play elevate a child's heart rate to an aerobic level. Running in circles in the front yard might seem fruitless and silly, but this typical activity actually goes some good. Running requires coordination and balance to keep from falling. Game time play can be one of the most effective types of coordination exercise.

Climbing on playground equipment provides plenty of exercise as well as coordination involving decision making and strength. As cliched as it sounds, sound bodies make sound minds. Children must master their physical bodies to be prepared to learn. Encourage playground play every day, if possible. Climbing, running, jumping and mastering the other challenges on the playground give a child incredible confidence.

Kids can enjoy functional fitness while improving their balance and speed. Plyometric fitness is a type of exercise that helps you jump higher, run faster and gets your heart rate up. It's known to be more effective than aerobic exercise and kids find it more enjoyable than simply jogging around a track.

Plyometrics is one of the most popular training methods to improve speed, power and jumping ability. For high school and college athletes, most coaches use lower and upper body plyometrics. But to give athletes a head start, many coaches are using plyometrics with kids in middle school and grade school.

One of the primary purposes of physical education is to learn basic movement skills such as running and jumping. From these general skills, the individual can move to more complex and specific skills that occur in sports.

Physical education should be approached like the study of mathematics – you must master one skill before proceeding to the next. This means that PE teachers must avoid the temptation to allow students to skip basic skill sets as they move through the curriculum. As with a math student needing extra tutoring to master a skill set, coaches should give these kids the extra attention they need to learn how to properly run, jump, tumble, kick and throw.

So what is plyometrics? Many coaches describe plyometrics as any activity that involves a rapid stretching of a muscle (eccentric phase) immediately followed by a rapid shortening of that muscle (concentric phase). The delay between the phases needs to be short, no longer than .25 seconds to use the energy stored during the eccentric phase. To achieve this effect, plyometrics requires a mechanical shock stimulation that stimulates the muscles to produce the highest levels of muscle tension as rapidly as possible. The dynamic nature of shock training creates two processes: 1) a reflex increase in muscle tension and 2) the release of elastic energy stored in the muscles and tendons.

There’s no doubt that plyometrics can be a great training method to help develop powerful athletes who can run faster and jump higher, but when it comes to younger athletes, there are special prerequisites. With kids, as always, safety comes first.