Does this look like your athlete's diet?

Are you always looking for quick, healthy ways to fuel your fast-moving athlete? Me too. Registered dietitian, Judy Caplan, has three great meal suggestions in the February issue of WashingtonFAMILY.com.

Meal 1: Stir fry chicken and veggies with toasted sesame oil. Add cooked rice. Serve with a romaine salad topped with avocado slices and drizzle with olive oil and vinegar.

Meal 2: Turkey Chili – make chili using ground turkey breast, pinto or black beans, diced tomatoes, and chili seasonings. Serve topped with grated cheese and avocado. Round it out with whole wheat quesadillas and salsa.

Meal 3: Pasta – To cooked pasta, add olive oil, diced garlic and stir fry in large pan. Add chicken broth and parsley. Spoon sauce over; top with grated Parmesan cheese. Serve with romaine salad topped with mandarin oranges, toasted pine nuts, and dried cranberries. Can also serve with red sauce and turkey meat balls (made from left over turkey from meal 2).

What do you feed your hungry, hurried athletes?

Look familiar? Even the referee doesn't know what to do with this!

The old days were good, but they’re gone. Now, issues of safety, distance, parental work schedules, and availability of playing areas make neighborhood games something of a relic. And, I’m sorry. Fantasy soccer teams and X-Box games are no substitutes. Today’s answer to backyard games is organized youth sports.

But what about “Youth sports is out of control!” This weekend I spoke to a room full of coaches who are committed to bringing youth soccer back under control. The coaches who attended the Virginia Youth Soccer Association conference care about kids and want to help them be fitter, stronger and healthier so they discover what they’re made of on the athletic field.

If you’re one of those coaches~ who want the sports kids are playing now to stick with them for a lifetime~ thank you. Fit2finish is committed to supporting your efforts and helping you be the best for those kids.

Check out other posts on this site for sport health and fitness info and stay tuned for regular posts on fitness, stretching, warm ups, nutrition -all the things coaches have questions about.

Fit2finish is happy to host the conversation about health and fitness, so let’s have your comments and ideas. Go ahead, give it your best shot!

Caution: you may have trouble getting to the REST of your practice plan.

Here’s what we’ll be talking about at the VYSA Session.

I. What is (physical) Fitness?
o What are the demands of soccer?
o Can just playing the game make them fit for the game?

II. Fitness for Soccer – dynamic fitness, game-like demands
Skills + conditioning = Peak Performance that lasts (train skills, bodies and hearts)

III. Principles of Conditioning, The Science – all with the game in mind
o Intensity – “overload” vs “overtraining”
o Progression – gradual, not kill and recover
o Interval Training – work: rest ratio, quality work, train recovery
o Cross Training – alternate days, cooperate with multiple teams
o Recovery, including Stretching – stretch after training
o Cautions – injury prevention

IV. How to fit it into practice – practical, tricky, fun
1. Choose a skill to train.
2. Add the fitness.
3. Make it matter.
4. Make it fun.
5. Make it game-like.

V. Adding cardio-conditioning to scrimmages

VI. Demonstrations
o U6-U8: crazy days
o U9-U12: pin ball plyo intervals
o U13-14: resistance band tag
o High School: V-shuttle, hop and volley

VII. Fitting it into your practice

This is an opportunity to instruct athletes on proper jumping form. Girls tend naturally to bend at the waist rather than at the knees as you can see in the girl on the far right. (white t-shirt, black shorts) Prompting them to keep their heads up on landing helps shift their weight backward and encourages knee bending rather than the “folding forward” that calls upon already strong quadriceps muscles and stresses knees.

The wall jump can also be used to diagnose imbalances in strength. When the right leg is  stronger, they tend to list to the left, and vice versa. You can see the slight tilting in the air of the two girls in the middle (one in yellow shorts, one in light blue t-shirt). Both favor their right side in take off.

Most important for girls: teach them how to quiet their landings by bending their knees to act as a cushion. The quiet landing is a great source of individual auditory feedback for them, as they can’t “see” their form and may not sense their tendency to absorb the landing shock with straightened leg. Bent knee landings and the recruitment of the hamstrings to bend on lift and landing are keys to keeping their knees healthy and safe from injury.

I also use this as a diagnostic screening for muscle weakness in hips which contributes to the dangerous knee position (known as valgus) where knees roll in toward the midline. Girls with significant knee valgus have been shown to be at greater risk of ACL injury.

One girl (quiz: can you tell which one?) is a year younger than the rest and exhibits awkward bending from the waist and rolling in at the knees to perform and attempt to balance the step-over. Rapid limb growth with lagging development of muscle mass create this coordination challenge. These girls (and their coaches) need to be patient as development occurs and they regain body control. (answer:girl in light blue t-shirt and headband in the back row)

Coaches want their athletes to stay strong and execute their game plan all the way to overtime – if necessary. But finding time during practice to add conditioning is a tough fit.

Join me and your fellow coaches in this interactive session where we’ll pinpoint how to fit fitness into your practice session. All ages. All genders. All ability levels.

Here’s the session description. Share it with your friends and fellow coaches:

Are your athletes as strong in the last minutes of the game as the first? If not, are you feeling the time squeeze to fit in conditioning? 

Don’t sacrifice skill development to add fitness, blend them.  Dr. LeBolt will show you how to incorporate conditioning for endurance, balance, strength and agility into your existing practice plan.

Your reward: Athletes who play  stronger for longer and stand up better to the demands of today’s youth sports.

We’ll be posting a 12 week training plan with scheduled training runs 4 days per week to help you work your way up to a successful performance on race day.

Contact us to tell us whether you’re a beginning, intermediate or advanced runner and we’ll tailor a training plan to your needs. Then we’ll KEEP in TOUCH to help you stay on track to reach your goal.

Beginning in February, Fit2Finish will share bi-weekly motivational emails with training advice on the hot topics like:

• Eating right
• Hydrating
• Goal setting
• Staying motivated
• Plus, tips for race day to take away the worries and let you put all your energy into running your best race.

Here’s to finishing the race this year with your personal best time!

Stretching and chatting build team especially for girls

Recovery. Every athlete needs it. Suzy Germain says it’s missing from her son’s topnotch team and that’s taking a toll.

Wayne Goldsmith, in his January 4th blog post, has a great mnemonic to help us think about how recovery  – that is, time off from sport-specific conditioning and training – re-charges the elite athlete so he can go back to training hard. This is also essential for players with nagging injuries and/or many games in a short period of time. Give them time to “washup.”

Wayne calls it WASHUP.

Water: the use of different forms of water, e.g cryotherapy (ice), hydrotherapies (contrast showers, “hot-cold” baths, spas, saunas, swimming pools etc).

Active Rest: doing something physically active other than the primary training and competition activity, e.g. walking, swimming or cycling instead of running.

Sleep: ensuring adequate quality and quantity of sleep.

Hydration and refueling: drinking the right fluids and eating the right foods at the right time, in the right quantity and of the right type to enhance recovery.

Unwind mentally: mental and emotional recovery is just as important as the physical aspects of recovery.

Physical Therapies: including massage, physiotherapy, stretching and Yoga.

Rest and recovery between practices is essential to every athlete’s sport performance. Even though our young athletes seem to be able to bounce back from training, or even sustain it at a pretty high level, you might be surprised at what a little intentional recovery can do for them.

Sprint speed and fitness will win many balls.

Interval Training ~ Using Recovery as a Training Tool: One of the best techniques sport scientists have to offer to maximize efficiency of practice time is interval training ~alternating periods of hard training with shorter periods of rest in a fixed ratio, perhaps 5 or 6:1, depending on the demands of the training. They can work harder in these shorter high intensity bursts when they have rest intervals between. By the end of practice, they will have performed more high intensity (quality) minutes of training than they would in a session that had constant moderate demands with little or no rest.

Make it like the game they play: Fitness training with intervals is an especially good way to structure your practice if the game your athletes play requires all-out effort interspersed with less intense effort. Sprinting and jogging. Driving and recovering. Attack and defend. Get their bodies used to game demands at practice. You’ll have fitter, better prepared athletes.

Suzy Germain, Championship player and coach

When Suzy Germain and her freshman class (1980) teammates were  recruited by Anson Dorrance to play for the UNC Tarheels, they were a force to be reckoned with. Describing it, Suzy says, “Practice was a battle. We took over every starting position. We knew we were better.” She says this matter-of-factly, with the confidence I’m sure gave her an edge on the playing field. There was no question that Suzy came to college for one reason: to play soccer.

That was the early 80’s. These girls were riding the wave of Title IX. More opportunities were opening up for girls in the sports venue. National Federation of State High School Associations statistics show that girl’s high school soccer participation grew more than 600% in the decade between 1971- 1981. But did the number of really top notch female athletes grow at that rate? Suzy’s recollection is that the strongest athletes were few and a tight knit group. Easy to spot and easy to recruit by enterprising coaches.

Cut to the young women of today who are competing on their high school teams with high hopes of playing in college. There are many more college women’s soccer programs, Division I, II and III, in 2011/12. But the explosion in the number of girls playing soccer has kept pace. While there weren’t very many programs for women in the early 80’s Suzy wonders whether the percentages  really have changed much. The statistics bear this out.

The NCAA estimates (I have used the calculation methods designed by NCAA to generate estimates) the chances of a female high school senior soccer player landing a roster spot on a college team in 1981 was 6.4%. For college freshman in 2009 it was 6.7%. NCAA research estimates for boys put their chances at 5.7%. Though the NCAA does go on to calculate the chances of going pro for boys: 0.04%. Women’s professional opportunities are so limited they are not calculated.

The bottom line: while more kids are playing and more programs are providing teams, the chances your kid will make the college team is probably no better than it was 30 years ago. Male  or female, they need to be:

• in the top 5- 6% in the nation. That means on a championship area team and a top player on that team.
• willing to look at Division I, II or III programs and flexible in their geographic demands. The chances to play Division I soccer are much slimmer: Under 2%.
• able to stand up to an exhausting schedule of training, practices and travel
• championship time managers because time for homework is slim even with study haul and tutorial help usually available.

If this looks like an impossible dream, it just may be.

Suzy and I agree. It would be healthier and more reasonable to:

• establish more realistic tiers for our kids playing soccer (and probably all sports).
• find an appropriate playing level where they can compete and grow in their fitness and athleticism.
• take the college pressure off the table.
• consider the club and recreational options many colleges now offer. Lower pressure. More fun. Still highly competitive.

If they show the highest potential (Be objective about this. Get a professional coach’s opinion!) then help them move up the ranks to the appropriate level of challenge. But for the other 95%, let’s put the ranks in place so all our kids have a safe and healthy place to play.

Next up in the Fit2Finish blog: stories of young athletes who have walked the gauntlet of college recruitment and beyond. You don’t want to miss hearing these.