In today’s athletic world, adolescent strength & conditioning is becoming more prevalent, as more and more young athletes are realizing the benefits of resistance training on their performance on the courts & fields. This wasn’t always the case, and there are still many out there that believe lifting weights as a young person can be detrimental to their health. The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth. Just as with any physical activity, there are some risks, but these risks are mitigated by having those youth athletes train under supervision from certfied youth strength & conditioning specialists. Roughly 10 years ago the National Strength & Conditioning Association released an updated position on Youth Resistance Training. This article (you can find HERE) goes on to conclued that “Despite outdated concerns regarding the safety or effectiveness of youth resistance training, scientific evidence and clinical impressions indicate that youth resistance training has the potential to offer observable health and fitness value to children and adolescents, provided that appropriate training guidelines are followed and qualified instruction is available.”

The truth of the matter is young athletes should be spending less time specializing in a sport, and should in turn spend that time conducting proper resistance training under qualified coaches. Spending even just 1 day a week performing moderate resistance training would go a long way in preparing the young athlete for sport, as well as help create more resiliance to injury through being a stronger athlete. “Strenght is never a weakness” -Mark Bell

FusionSport back in May was apart of this year’s G League Elite Camp and Draft Combine events in Chicago. The NBA Draft Combine enables the best of College Basketball to demonstrate their abilities to NBA teams, coaches and scouts in their bid to be drafted into the world’s most elite basketball competition. Follow this link HERE to read about the event as well as see the top 5 results from each event. 

Most people aren’t thinking about their ankles and how to strengthen them until they’ve got some sort of ankle issue or pain. By then unfortunately it’s already painful and a little late to ad, but don’t fret, nothing that can’t be undone!

First we’ll talk about some things you can do to address any current pain you might be experiencing at the moment. Conventional wisdom used to be to put ice and elevate a sprain, but one thing constantly overlooked in the “R.I.C.E.” method (rest, ice, COMPRESS, elevate) is, you guess it, Compression. DPT Kelly Starrett and author of “The Supple Leopard” goes into using a compression band on the ankle joint in the video below.

 

If you’re not suffering from any ankle pain, or once you are pain free, then working on your ankle mobility & flexibility is up next. In this quick video, Eric Cressey of famed Cressey Sports Performance briefly covers one such exercise called High Tension Ankle Mobility:

Once you’ve worked on reducing pain, and gaining mobility, its time to train some stability. An easy modification to any training your doing now, is to add single leg variations of any lower body exercises you may be doing, “Skater squats”, single leg RDLs, and single leg squats. Another thing you can add to any rest day, is training the actual foot muscles, by doing Toe Curls! Yes, although it may sound silly, strengthening the muscles of the foot are an excellent way to train for foot & ankle stability! 

One thing I still hear out there, is that weight training for kids before puberty is going to be detrimental. Either they’re going to have stunted growth, or going to cause some sort of lasting ailment, nothing could be furthere from the truth. There is plenty of science out there to dispell this “old wives tale” that youth weight lifting is detrimental to said youth, and the science also shows how not only is that myth busted, but quite the opposite is true! Here is a NYT article from 2010 covering this very topic

Phys Ed: The Benefits of Weight Training for Children

An article about how CEO Markus Deutsch and his company Fusion Sport has been listed in the Top 10 “Cutting-Edge Sports Technology Solution Providers, 2019” by Mirror Review. Read the article HERE