what might be a good model for a developing teen body and brain in terms of structuring training either internal to the you know 90 minutes that you've got on each of the nights or perhaps over each of those two nights the thursday sorry the tuesday yeah

and there's there's many ways you can go about i think particularly in those teenagers we talked about the peak height velocity and the things around that motor control you know limb control coordination is the warm-up is pretty crucial you know and we talk about um It's quite common is the RAMP protocol.

So raise, activate, move, potentiate.

So essentially raise your heart rate.

You want to get the blood pumping, get the body ready for exercise.

Activate is in terms of getting a neurological system ready to go.

So we call it the deep neuromuscular system.

Closing thoughts and reflections.

As a coach, how do you build psychological safety to ensure that kids don't get sped out the side as a young age because they feel like they're not being included, that the sport doesn't cater for them, that they don't have the skills or the endurance to keep up with the other kids?

Yeah, there's a couple of things there.

So I think in terms of your session design and your drill design, you've got to have a bit of an even playing field where you might have the group of the early achievers, the early peakers that have grown up from when they were younger doing it versus the late bloomers that might not... may have picked up the sport a little bit later or might just be a little bit slower in their developmental pathway so that you know they're sort of being paired or they're along similar skill sets um sorry they're getting paired with people with similar skill sets they feel that sense of belonging that sense of confidence um and vice versa so getting a mixture of that i think on top of being able to mix match them together because you know the more talented ones can bring up the less talented ones at the time and try and bridge that gap.

You talk about visual learning, kinesthetic learning, seeing that skill demonstrated because as a coach I want to not verbalise how to kick effectively to one student or one player within the team but if they watch one of their teammates do it they might be able to mimic it and see how that feels for them and they get that sort of skill acquisition exploratory phase within that so I think obviously having yeah like I said drill design where you can have drills that you know bring in all different skill levels having that sense of engagement so you're asking frequently throughout the whole group not just going to your usual five or six people so those kids and those athletes are feeling seen You know, they're not just there and they're sort of making up the numbers.

They're actually feeling validated.

And Doug Lemoff calls it cold calling.

So just sort of reaching out in a group and we used to do it as professional athletes too.

It's a nice summary, isn't it? Can we bounce through perhaps the long-term athlete development, which in many ways is a nice summary to what we've already talked about, but also a useful platform to introduce the next episode where we'll start to address those teams that are getting a little bit more serious.

Mm

...

these different kinds of things.

So I kinda turned it down at the time, and I thought maybe that's it, you know, that was my last kinda crack.

And then, yeah, was playing in here 2023, 2024 at the Force.

Knew my time was finishing up at the Force, and they reached out again.

You know, said, "Hey, we got this Africa Cup.

Yeah.