3 Ways to Maintain Your Young Athlete During a Break From Sports

Summary

• During off-season or off-times, away from coaches, teammates and sports, you as a parent can keep your kid athletic.
• Parents have a major role in their kid’s development as an athlete. Yet, it’s important that you know what an athlete is. There are 4 main elements that make up an athlete.
• An athlete has strength and control physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially.
• Physically: keep your athlete moving. That doesn’t mean that they have to be lifting weights or performing some intense workout. Dancing or even skipping can be a great way to add movement.
• Mentally: help your athlete visualize making great plays or using perfect form. The body will respond to what the mind sees. It’s a great mental practice that should be done during the season as well.
• Emotionally: emotions are symptoms of how we perceive something. Teaching your athlete to perceive pressure or tough situation as a challenge, can affect the emotions they show. The other option is to perceive pressure as a threat. When you perceive pressure as a threat, you will have a different set of emotions. I think you will like looking at situations as a challenge more.
• Social: we are all social. Encourage your athlete to support and lift up others. As athletes, we are part of a team. As parents, we are part of a team. The more we lift each other up the better this world will be. So stay connect and continue to be the positive energy this world needs.

Full Transcript

Hey, David Sabi here with Kid to Athlete. Hey, thanks for joining this webinar. It has been prerecorded just so I can deliver the best message to you because today's message, we're talking about how you as a parent can help your athlete stay athletic because if they can't be meeting with their coaches or their teammates or trainers or get outside in their groups with friends and play their sport, it's going to be tough to impossible to maintain that or help develop it. But as parents, we have a lot of control over helping them become or even improve or maintain their athletic abilities. Because remember they have worked so hard in building themselves to play whatever sport they're playing and they put a lot of time, they put a lot of energy into it and so have you, and I don't want that to go to waste.

So we're going to go over some simple things that you can do as a parent to help your kid be an athlete, to be that person so when all of this passes and they go back out there and they go back into their sport, they didn't lose it all and it could be thanks to you. So before we get started, let me introduce myself. My name is David Sabi. I am a strength and conditioning specialist as well as an integrative nutrition health coach. Now I've been coaching and training for over 10 years and I played sports when I was younger and thanks to my dad, my dad was a big part of that. He was always researching and trying to learn how to get my sister and I to be athletes and I really appreciate that. And now as a parent myself with two kids, I want them to be athletes.

And so the real reason I developed Kid to Athlete was so I can help people like my dad and be like, "Hey, this is things that you should know." That way you don't have to go searching everywhere and research a lot of that stuff. And as parents, again, you have a different role than coaches. So it's geared toward parents. So all the information is how you can help. You don't have to be a coach, you don't have to be an expert at whatever sport your kid is playing. It's basically on how you can fit yourself into the proper role of being the parent of an athlete. And so let's get started. And the best thing that a parent can do for their kid to become an athlete is to understand what an athlete is. If you look up the definition of an athlete, you'll find that, well, the athlete's definition is all physical based.

You go to Google, say what's the definition of an athlete, and you'll see that it says somebody with strength, stamina, and some skills so they can do an exercise or sport or games. That's true, but it's not the complete picture. So the first thing that I would definitely recommend is, let's get the proper definition. Now I created this definition because I think it encompasses a complete athlete. And so my definition of an athlete is a person with strength and control physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially. These are four different elements, four different categories. They all need to work well and they all work together. And so if you use this as a framework, then you can help maintain or even improve your athlete. So you don't have to focus just on the physical aspect.

Exercising, running, all that physical stuff is good, but it doesn't mean that's it. We've got a lot more. The mental, right, the mental part of the game. If you played sports, you know what I'm talking about. There's that mental side, the mindset, the focus. Then you look at the emotional side and a lot of times I hear coaches say, "Well, emotions is a sign of weakness." It is not a sign of weakness. And I don't want you to try to eliminate emotions. Emotions are what give us the passion for the sport. It's what gives us that energy. And so do not think that emotions are a sign of weakness. It's part of the game. It's part of who we are as people. So don't eliminate that or think of that as a sign of weakness.

And then socially, I mean, you got to work with your coaches, you got to work with your teammates, you got to work with others. There is a social aspect and that's probably one of my favorite parts of being an athlete is you are part of a community, you're part of a team. And that's awesome. So using that as a framework can help guide you on how to help your kid either be an athlete, improve as an athlete, or just maintain their athlete or athletic abilities. So let's start off with the first one on that framework, and that's physical. Things to do when you're at home and you can't meet with your team or you can't meet with your coaches. The best thing to do, keep your athlete moving, just moving. It doesn't matter what they're doing as long as they're active in some way.

You can have them dance. I mean, dancing is moving. You can have them do exercises they know. If they're a basketball player, make sure the ball's in their hand, getting moving with the ball. If they're a tennis player and they can't get out to the courts, doing the actual movements and swinging. Just keep your athlete moving. One of the most underrated exercises or drills that you can do that is really simple is skipping. And I know that some people are like, well, that's not really much, but it's great because if you have really young kids like I do, you can have your kids skip. If you have a high school athlete that's more advanced in their running abilities, you can still have them skip.

When I was in college, I was recruited as a decathlete and we used to use skipping drills as a warmup and it's great because it helps with the fundamentals. So you can do skipping, just regular skipping. You could go skipping with a high knee, which is also known as like an A skip. And then you can do skipping with kicks, which is known as the B skip, and so when you're looking at these different types of skips, you can get really nitty-gritty on how your athlete's doing it. Again, my point is, keep your athlete moving. Whatever they're doing should be good as long as they're active. And that's for physical. If they can work out, great. If you feel comfortable and you have weights and you know how to cue them or coach them through certain exercises, then do it. That'd be awesome.

And then let's go into the mental side. How do you get your athlete to work on the mental part of the game? Well, you can do visualization work. Visualization work is probably going to be one of your best things right now being that you're at home and you can do this with your athlete by simply having them close their eyes. You have them close their eyes, you'll start to see them just relaxed for a little bit and then you can start to paint a picture and have them... let's go back to our basketball player. You have them say, okay, you're going to be practicing your free throw shots visually. You focus on your form, everything is perfect. And you can have them either visualize themselves in first person where they're actually doing the shot, or you can have them watching themselves.

So it's like they're watching their own form and make sure that they're just visualizing perfect form every time. And then if you wanted to, you can also do another kind of visualization work where you have them visualize themselves doing the free throw shot, but under pressure. And so you can paint the scene. You can say, "Okay, this is the last shot. It's the game-winning shot. You have to make this, the crowd is going crazy, your coach is going crazy, your team's depending on you." And so what you're doing is you're trying to build that pressure, but mentally. So visually they can see themselves under pressure and hopefully you can describe it so that they feel it. But the great thing about visualization work is you can also start to coach them through certain things.

So tell them, "Hey, let's calm down. Let's see how we feel, can you block the crowd out? Can you concentrate on your breathing?" And so you to work on doing these things and the importance of that and the importance of you painting the picture, painting the scene is that when they do get back into the game and they do find themselves in that situation under pressure, it's going to be familiar. And when it's familiar, they're going to be like, "Hey, I've been here before. This is no big deal." They'll start concentrating on their breathing. They'll start concentrating on maybe just focusing on what they need to focus on so that they don't break under pressure. And so visualization work, one of the best things you can do, especially if you're at home and you can't really do too much.

All right, so now let's look at the next element in our framework of being an athlete. And that's emotions. And again, a lot of times I hear coaches or even parents say, "Emotions is a sign of weakness." It is not a sign of weakness. If anything, emotions are a symptom. And what's causing the symptom? Well, let's look at how they're perceiving something. Let's say they're under pressure. Let's go back to that basketball player because we already talked about that. Game-winning shot under pressure. Now what kind of emotions are they having? And I'll tell you what, it's a symptom of probably how they're perceiving that situation. If you think about it, you can look at a situation in two ways. You can look at it as a challenge or you can look at it as a threat.

If you look at it as a challenge, your body physically will react differently. If you look at it as a challenge, your mental state will react or respond differently. If you look at it as a challenge, you will have a certain set of emotions come out and that's where we're looking at. Those emotions at least in this one. Now let's look at and perceive the situation, that under pressure situation, let's look at it as a threat. What happens when you look at it as a threat? Your body will physically be different. Think about what happens when you're scared. Do you think you're all nice and loosey-goosey? Not necessarily. Now, mentally, if you look at it and you perceive something or the situation as a threat, mentally you're just going to be different.

And again, if you look at it as a threat emotionally, you're going to be portraying pride and negative emotions. And those are what you don't want. Especially when you're doing sports, especially when you're under pressure, you don't want those negative emotions anywhere. Because like I said, emotions are energy. Negative emotions are not the energy you want. So when you're looking at something, especially when you're looking at your kid's emotions, look at how they're perceiving the situation. Are they looking at it as a challenge or are they looking at it as a threat? Now you can help guide them by simply saying, "Hey, look at it as a challenge." Or you can help show them or you can help them by showing them, look, it's a challenge.

And the situation we're in now where we have to be at home, we can't be outside with our friends and teammates and all that stuff. Well, this is a time where we can actually show them how to live with the perception that this is a challenge. The situation we're in now, it's a challenge. Yeah, it's tough. Yeah, you may not like it, but we're going to push through. We're going to take this on as a challenge because when you take it on as a challenge, your body reacts differently, mentally, you respond differently, your emotions are different and you want all those things to be good so that your athlete or your kid can see that. So basically how do you get your athlete to be working on that emotional element? Well, you show them and be the example, be the role model for that. And I'm telling you, it's probably going to be more important to do that than to tell them. That takes care of the emotions.

Now the last one on our framework is social. And the social aspect is again, very important as well because we are athletes. We are a community, we are all together. And if you're working with your kid, you are family and family must be strong. They must stick together. And whether you've got teammates, whether you got coaches, connect with them because again, that support is what helps us all. And that support to lift each other up is what's going to get us through these challenging times. So make sure that you stay connected with your teammates as well and stay connected with your friends, families and try to lift everybody up. And really that's all I really wanted to say today in this message.

And so if you think this video or webinar can help somebody and lift them up as well, then please share it. Really, I just want to help. That's why I created Kid to Athlete just so that I can help parents raise kids so that they can be athletes. And again, not just so they can be athletes to play a sport, but so they can be athletes because athletes are, if you think about it, they're hard-working, they know how to set goals. They have grit. They can fail but continue on. And that's what you want because you keep continuing on and pushing through these hard times and challenges, you're going to do well. And that's all I want for you, for your family, for your athletes. And that's my message to you. So I hope that helps, again, share this message if it can help somebody else, and thank you for watching.