Running training for 10/11 year olds

I just have to ask and I want to extend the question to AK. When the two of you say things like, "Prolonged maxing out of HR is not good for kids." or "and it's probably not good for their developing hearts." Do you mean that they will get sick/hurt their hearts (show me the well designed study that shows this I still won't believe it but at least I will know why you said it) or do you mean it will make them less likely to continue running?

There is no way hard work EVER hurt a healthy 10 year old but there are many that it caused to stop running.

otter wrote:

I have seen a lot of youth programs, some in my area that drive the children hard with intervals (which is bad for them), and have a high emphasis on competition.

What? Please site your sources that show that youth soccer is "bad for children." I say youth soccer because that IS 90% intervals at maximal intensity for 2 x 30m on a regular basis. I played mid-fielder for over six years as a youth and have no doubt that that type of training is what led me to state leading performances in track and cross country. I seriously doubt any of these youth track coaches are coming anywhere near that level of intensity with their track workouts that you are saying is "bad" for them. Next time you see a 5th, 6th, or 7th grade soccer match pay attention to the accelerations and brief rest periods and you'll see that they're working at near maximum on every one of them with much less than 60s recovery in most instances.

Kids are doing this kind of training ALL the time, right in front of you. It's mind-numbing to me that soccer is likely the most widely accepted youth development program among endurance-minded adults, yet when kids are placed on a track or field and asked to essentially mimic a standard soccer practice or game-type situation by doing some structured running (e.g. intervals if you like) then the coach is pushing them too hard? That makes no sense at all! It's the same activity only there's no ball. The body has NO idea if its soccer practices or running specific practices.

I agree, thanks for saving me all that typing.

FTIR wrote:

I just have to ask and I want to extend the question to AK. When the two of you say things like, "Prolonged maxing out of HR is not good for kids." or "and it's probably not good for their developing hearts." Do you mean that they will get sick/hurt their hearts (show me the well designed study that shows this I still won't believe it but at least I will know why you said it) or do you mean it will make them less likely to continue running?

There is no way hard work EVER hurt a healthy 10 year old but there are many that it caused to stop running.

...so glad I was not the only one catching statments like that as off base.

The biathlon coach said that there were studies or articles that suggested the intense activity from interval training could result in heart valve problems later in life. I haven't looked up the studies, but would be very interested in seeing them if they are available. The guy is pretty credible as a youth development coach, so I do take his word for it, and if the kids don't like that kind of training anyway why push it?

FTIR wrote:

I just have to ask and I want to extend the question to AK. When the two of you say things like, "Prolonged maxing out of HR is not good for kids." or "and it's probably not good for their developing hearts." Do you mean that they will get sick/hurt their hearts (show me the well designed study that shows this I still won't believe it but at least I will know why you said it) or do you mean it will make them less likely to continue running?

There is no way hard work EVER hurt a healthy 10 year old but there are many that it caused to stop running.

I agree you don't push kids. But you must provide the kids with good information and this biathalon coach doesn't have it or else as huh? said soccer players would have lots of heart problems. Once they have good information, kids will push themselves enough on their own.

As stated, soccer's been covered but I could have easily added youth basketball, hockey, and swimming just as easily in the example with soccer.

Youth swimming is openly regarded as one of the best aerobic system developers - worldwide. These kids do TONS of intervals at very high percentages of their maximum heart rates for hours each day.

Hockey is akin to soccer - long sessions of continuous all-out sprints from one end of the rink to the other.

My eight year old daughter (and a zillion others just like her) performs 4 x 5m (20 minutes total) of continuous interval accelerations at a very high intensity during each of their games.

All of these activities are well respected and I might add accepted forms of youth development are the same with respect to relative intensities and extended periods of short intense intervals of upwards of 30 - 60 minutes in one session.

Track and cross country training sessions that include regulated intervals across all intensity ranges are a must even in the developmental stage.

Of course it wouldn't surprise me one bit if 9 of 10 parents and 7 of 10 developmental coaches in the US agreed with the previously posted reasoning that declares intervals are detrimental to youth development and should be avoided until some magical age somewhere around 15 or 16.

Balanced application is everything.

i know a particularly good example of a young female from new hampshire. she was amazing at a young age winning road races and beating all the boys her age, she was sub 19 at 13 years old running 18:51 at a 5k a week or two after her middle school state meet. she trained very hard for a girl her age, and had been to Junior Olympic nationals atleast 2 years in a row before entering high school, once in highschool she ran well, but didn't improve on her times from in middle school and now by her senior year is rumored to be into hard drugs and ran on her teams JV squad a couple major meets this year, all while her shocked parents realize that the college scholarship they started pushing for in middle school is basically gone. She is an example of why i don't want my kid training for any sport outside of practice until they get to high school. thank you. also a hearty congratulations to anyone who can give an accurate guess of who this girl might be

Rumored to be on hard drugs?

…now you’re starting a contest to see if someone can actually post her real identity on a website viewed by the entire running world?

With all due respect…sam…you’re so out of line that I can't even respond to the crazy reasoning in the rest of your post.

You better hope nobody out's this girl becasue if she's NOT doing hard drugs, it's going to be a BIG deal.

All I had said was that a child's nervous system is not fully developed to be able to handle anaerobic based work. This is what Lydiard had written in every one of his books.

I guess you guys know more than he did. Sounds like you didn't develop that well. Must be all those soccer intervals.

I bet I can name more current and former world class runners who started competing at a young age than you can who did not.

Off the top of my head:

Ruth Wysocki

Suzy Favor

Meredith Rainey

Joetta Clark

Regina Jacobs

Hazel Clark

Alisa Hill

Francie Larrieu

Shalane Flanagan

Amy Skieresz

Jearl Miles Clark

Mary Slaney

Kim Gallagher

Lynn Jennings

To keep the list short, I am using female middle and distance runners. Btw - Over 80% of the US top sprinters came through the AAU and USATF age group programs.

The AAU, TAC/USATF have had competitive youth t&f programs for many decades. --Don't make blanket statements, unless you think you are smarter than the collective wisdom of both of those organizations. People love to point out the examples kids who did not progress, but fail to recoginize the thousands who do.

otter wrote:All I had said was that a child's nervous system is not fully developed to be able to handle anaerobic based work. This is what Lydiard had written in every one of his books. I guess you guys know more than he did. Sounds like you didn't develop that well. Must be all those soccer intervals.

1) What the hell is anaerobic base work?

2) If Lydiard is you're only source, then that's a very weak argument. I want the science that says that middle-school children lack the ability to neurologically adapt to specific modes of interval training, not an observational hunch that supports one man's conceptual training model. Good lord otter... are you for real?

3) After you produce the scientific articles (which you likely cannot do) that make such ridiculous claims, then feel free to explain the obvious cardiovascular, aerobic, anaerobic, not to mention the increased coordination benefits these children gain from such developmental sports as soccer, basketball, swimming, hockey, wrestling, and YES running as a stand alone sport.

Oh and for the record, I am positive that I have more knowledge regarding exercise/human physiology than Lydiard ever had. Oh, and I'm sure it had everything to do with years of intensive graduate school studies and research on this very subject... it had nothing to do with all those fantastic intervals I did as a kid you idiot.

Our kids soccer is causing injuries. We now must play wheel chair children on the field for so many minutes..like others. Two kids just ran into them did not look fast enough. We also cannot keep score and this year a board is to be placed in front of net so no goals can be scored. It hurts kids feelings if goals are scored. In elementary and even middle school the fun runs, no names can ever be mentioned. Kids out in front or finishing first are now being told to wait for few minutes..then they can run after all the other kids. A law suit was nearly filed agaist a elementary school for listing the elementary kids by order of finish in a elem. fun run of one mile. Even though the elementary school little paper had only listed first names only...that was not good enough. I do agree that kids like to run easy in pack on trail runs. A 2k does need some long easy running. It is so tough for youth coaches to take care of all the kids at same time...but they do a great job.

AK-47 wrote:

2X/week an easy trail runs of 10-30 or 40 min. Most will need some walk breaks.

damn, thats more than I ran in high school and I was still a very competitive runner. Id say dont run at all. just enjoy recreational activities, its not like running at age 11 will help you when you are 20. it will most likely end up hurting you.

Amen, Amen I say to you.

TrackCoach wrote:

I bet I can name more current and former world class runners who started competing at a young age than you can who did not.

Off the top of my head:

Ruth Wysocki

Suzy Favor

Meredith Rainey

Joetta Clark

Regina Jacobs

Hazel Clark

Alisa Hill

Francie Larrieu

Shalane Flanagan

Amy Skieresz

Jearl Miles Clark

Mary Slaney

Kim Gallagher

Lynn Jennings

To keep the list short, I am using female middle and distance runners. Btw - Over 80% of the US top sprinters came through the AAU and USATF age group programs.

The AAU, TAC/USATF have had competitive youth t&f programs for many decades. --Don't make blanket statements, unless you think you are smarter than the collective wisdom of both of those organizations. People love to point out the examples kids who did not progress, but fail to recoginize the thousands who do.

You'll have kids come and go, soccer does, baseball does, basketball does, track does.

No sport is any different, the coaches are though, and if you can hook your kid up with a coach that can communicate and encourage, teach training sufficiently and encourage 100% effort in racing; the kid might experience success and stick with it like the athletes mentioned above.

The athlete has to buy in, period. I don't care the age, they have to want to do it, they then need the support of their parents (I can't tell you the amount of kids I've seen sabotaged by their parents), everyone needs a positive support group.

The term "Burn out" is overused, I hear it from high school distance runners that aren't serious about what they do, "I'm not going to train during the off season because I don't want to burn out like so and so." It's a lack of focus, goals, and buy in. Nobody burns out, they just decide it's too much work for too little gain, they choose the easier road. So be it.

I encourage any young athlete that comes to me to play whatever sport they like to play in addition to track and cross country practice, and although I give them the opportunity to work out 6 days a week, whenever they can make practice is fine with me.

When a talented kid comes my way, I will encourage them to get serious and attend more practices, the structure of the weekly workouts and consistant attendence assures significant improvement. Assures success, increases the longevity of interest in the sport.

Every kid needs to have the neuromuscular aspects of running trained into them, quick turnover, efficiency, and injury prevention is the key to success and longevity in the sport. Make sure you have a coach that knows the neuro aspects of running.

This is an interesting and worthy topic but some of you sanctimonious dweebs do need to chill.

Below is an interesting article on the effects of a 4k race effort on heart function in 9-14 year old boys. The conclusion is that there are no bad effects at this short-term steady-state type of endurance activity. I emailed one of the authors who said that they didn't know of any published studies on intense interval training but would be interested in finding out more. You wonder if there could be some obscure Eastern European studies out there, or mayb the whole issue is urban legend and we should be advocating 16 X 400 for 10-12 year olds.

Regarding soccer and swimming, the level of intensity is generally not as high as with fast reps of 200 to 400 meters. I'm not sure, but do young swimmers consistently get their HR up to 220, when they're doing intervals? And in soccer, the intense effort is not sustained for long. They have bursts of 10, maybe 20 seconds, but then they slow down. I agree that soccer is a great way for kids to establish a base that can convert to running or endurance sports.

"Cardiac Effects of a Competitive Road Race in Trained Child Runners"

Thomas Rowland*, Donna Goff, Patricia DeLuca*, and Barbara Popowski*

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ABSTRACT

Background. Animal studies and investigations of adult endurance athletes indicate a transient depression of myocardial function after prolonged high-intensity exercise.

Purpose. To determine whether a similar decrease is observed in child distance runners after a 4-km competitive road race.

Methods. Anthropometric measures, resting M-mode echocardiograms, maximal cycle exercise tests with estimation of cardiac output, and electrocardiograms were performed before a 4-km road race in nine run-trained boys (mean age, 12.2 years). Weight and resting echocardiogram and electrocardiogram were assessed immediately after the race. The entire test battery was repeated 24 hours later.

Results. Small but significant decreases in mean body weight and left ventricular end-diastolic dimension were observed immediately after the race, but there were no changes in shortening fraction. These findings are consistent with the effects of dehydration. Measurements returned to prerace values by 24 hours of recovery. Peak work capacity, maximal stroke volume, and maximal cardiac output were similar on prerace and 24-hour-postrace testing. No electrocardiographic abnormalities were observed.

Conclusions. No adverse cardiac effects were observed from a competitive 4-km road race in male child distance runners.

I didn't say base work, I said anaerobic based work. Tarnslation: anaeobic type work. I know it's difficult to understand.

I'll take Lydiard's view over yours considering he developed his views after sixty years of research. You say you know more than he ever did, so you're on your own.

I was at Hampshire Hills last night and I saw the girl you are bad mouthing working out with her high school team. The girl has a new coach working with her and he is doing a great job with her. This winter she is one of the top girls in the state; but more important from my observation of her over the past few months is she is a kid that is high on life and not "drugs".

Sam, you're an asshole and I am sure you must be bitter that you know she could kick your ass in a 3k.

Sam you pussy, if you want, I will meet you at Hampshire Hills next Wednesday around 6:OO PM and we can discuss this issue further.

Every mile you run before high school is one less mile you will want to run after high school.