Friday, April 28, 2006

Book Review - Children & Sports Training by: Jozef (no thats not a typo) Drabik

Wa! Cover so cute!! (inside is some serious stuff though!)
In a nutshell, this book is excellent. Why? Well firstly its stuff we don't usually hear in "fitness" magazines and places like that. Its about youth atheletic development (one of my favorite areas of athlete to work with). The author is a PhD in Sports Science from Poland. In short this book is a summary of 3 decades of communist eastern bloc youth training (around 12 yrs old or less).

Secondly if the stuff in it is implemented in our country, we will have a much greater chance of achievement in high level (world championchips/Olympics) sports simply because more children will be given the movement skills and basic fitness from their youngest ages to give them a chance to be competent in sport. As psychologists know, competence has a big part to play in self motivation i.e. they feel they are good at atheletic things so they are more motivated to train and spend time playing sports. (maybe this will lower the Maple Story/Dota/World of Warcraft epidemic in our land!)

What it teaches are the fundamentals of "fitness" such as speed, strength, flexibility, endurance etc and when are the best ages (from the collected research of the Polish national sports development program) to devlop these attributes. So we focus on training those attributes that are currently having the most potential. For e.g. aerobic endurance is best taught at about 6 yrs old so we focus on training that during the period.

The book follows up with sample PE programs and activities which look REALLY interesting and FUN (thats so important!) and would be great develpoment for any child, whether or not he/she is going to be an Olympian.

I know that over here... our PE lessons are the first ones to be taken out to be replaced with more maths/science/etc :(

No PE-->no physical development-->no competence in athletics-->dun feel like doing sport--> lets hope muscles and movement skills are trained by the "ASDW" keys + mouse clicking. I THINK NOT! We end up (not all of course) as a weak and soft generation.

This book has alot of stuff that I will be doing with my future children. I won't put "pressure" on them to be world class sportsmen/women, but I will give them the best possible training, so that if they decide to do so, they will have the best possible up-bringing that will help them be successful!

BTW I bought this book online from Elite Fitness Systems. Thats an AWESOME website run by some of the strongest and most knowledgeable men in the world in the area of atheletics and sports. Its a wonderful small buisness. Once my shipment got lost and they sent another one at their expense! Customer service top notch and world class!

posted by Coach Jonathan Wong @ 4/28/2006 07:29:00 PM Comments: 0