Training for sprogs

“Don’t worry son, your time will come”

The frankly awesome Steve Maxwell put a brilliant post up on his blog a few weeks ago. Last month we were privileged enough to have Steve write a guest article for the mag, and the reason I contacted him to do so is because he has the kind of insight that can only come when you’ve spent as long as he has in the world of physical training.

His post on training for kids hit home with me, which is kind of odd considering I don’t actually have any kids of my own (yet) and don’t work with kids. The reason it resonated with me was because even though I wouldn’t have ever considered myself as an athletic child, I was pretty active as I grew up in a great place where all the best fun was to be had outdoors.

Steve lists ten suggestions for keeping kids active, and looking at the list I can see a few that immediately stand out as things I did as a kid, namely…

• Make everything a game
• Danger Jumping!
• Encourage your kid to self-locomote
• Teach your kid to swim
• Get your city kids out in the woods

Make everything a game

I used to set myself challenges. My friend Robyn’s house was only a few hundred metres away, but whenever I went there after school I would make it my challenge to see how far I could sprint before running out of wind. As soon as I got to the bottom of my garden path I would tear off, and over a period of some weeks I got to the point where I could make it all the way to his doorstep before stopping.

Another challenge was Vicarage Lane. My friend Jon lived almost directly up the valley from me in a vertical line. My house was pretty much directly at the bottom, and to get to his house I had to go up one of the steepest roads in the village. It was a hellish hill that at first I could barely make a few steps without running out of steam, but eventually I could run all the way to the top (albeit at a steady pace) without stopping. It was little things like these that kept me motivated. Kids respond well to individual challenges.

Danger Jumping

I had to laugh when I read Steve’s description of piling up cushions for his kids to jump into. I used to do the same thing when my parents went out. If there was something high for me to jump off (and I had something relatively soft to land on) I would do it. Of course, I was busy pretending to be Superfly Jimmy Snuka at the time!

In fact, danger jumping is one of those things that nearly every kid will do as a rite of passage. there were loads of spots near me local kids would dare each other to jump off. There was always a relative element of danger, but no-one I knew ever got hurt. I can remember jumping off waterfalls, bridges, buildings… Once you got over the fear of doing it once, you could do it over and over.

Encourage your kid to self-locomote

Where I grew up, there was plenty of stuff to do, but most of the time it was deep in the woods or high up a mountain. Asking your parents for a lift was out of the question – anyway, whose parents were around in the summer holidays? We walked or rode our bikes everywhere, and sometimes we went for miles and miles. We travelled distances that made the film Stand By Me look like a trip to the corner shop.

Teach your kid to swim

In this month’s mag we’ve got a great interview with Rampage Jackson, who had us in stitches with his stories of being ‘rescued’ by Japanese life guards because they thought he couldn’t swim. We were all talking that day and his manager Anthony made a good point in saying that pretty much every kid in the UK knows how to swim as we were taught in school.

I had already learned to swim before we did our swimming certificates, and so had most of my friends. We would all go swimming in rivers during the school holidays – sometimes this ended up in near hypothermia or a few days worth of diarrhoea, but that never stopped us. Playing in water in one of life’s greatest joys, and one every kid should know.

Photo of Blaenavon, a small town at the head of the valley where I grew up. Photo by Just_Plain_Bobert

Get your city kids out in the woods

I’m kind of lucky that I grew up in the Welsh valleys, an area I love. Only one side of my valley was populated, the other was an unbroken 4-mile long stretch of woodland called the Lasgarn, which I knew like the back of my hand. We didn’t need to go on camping trips – we could spend every day far from other people and still be back home for dinner.

I think playing outside is something kids nowadays just don’t get to experience. ‘Active’ kids get shuttled from football practice to music lessons to swimming to… You see where this is going. Instead of being allowed out to roam, explore, discover and experience, they’re being stifled and cocooned within a protective environment that is well-meaning but ultimately detrimental to their upbringing.

The playgrounds of my youth. Photo by Just_Plain_Bobert

I’m not advocating chucking kids out of the house at 9am and not allowing them back in until dark, as kids left alone will usually turn at least semi-feral and amuse themselves by a: torturing the weakest member of the pack, or b: engaging in some petty vandalism and / or other criminal activity.

Still, letting kids off the leash is a good thing, especially when they’ve got an environment like the above to play in. The opportunities for building healthy bodies and minds are huge, and far better for a growing child than turkey twizzlers and playstations.

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