Pushing Limits In Your Young Athlete

Summary

• For your kid to go to the next level as an athlete, they need to push their limits. We can help as parents, but the athlete will have to push it on their own.
• The first way as a parent to help your athlete push their limits is by providing proper nutrition. This can help them to train harder, recover faster, and have better mental focus.
• Another simple way to push limits is to set goals above their limits. Help your athlete create big goals that are impossible when looking at where they are currently. Then set more realistic goals that are just above their limit. This will help them focus on the next level.
• Celebrate all wins. Big, small, and everything in between. Remind your athlete of the times they could not do something. They need to remember that it took time and some work. Plus it will build the confidence to continue to push limits.
• Focus on the process. In the process of pushing limits, failure is inevitable. The more comfortable your athlete is with the whole process of trial and error, the more they will continue to push limits. And as parents, we need to understand the whole process. This will keep us in check and not get too focused on the failures. Think about when your kid was learning to walk. We didn’t yell at them every time they fell down. We understood the process of learning to walk.
• As parents, we can help our kids push their limits, but they must be the ones to push “their” limits.

Full Transcript

Hey, David Sabi here with Kid to Athlete. We're going over limits, specifically on how you can help your kid push their limits so they can go to the next level. So let's put up the bar. This is their limit. This is their capabilities, their capacity for what they can do. We're trying to raise that bar. The first way we can help our athletes bring that bar up and help them push that limit is by nutrition. Nutrition is real simple, but remember they are growing and so their limits are going to be going up anyway because they're getting bigger, their legs are getting longer, so they might be running faster now. So if we can just help get them to grow as strong as they can with, again, high nutrient-dense foods, then it's going to give them a better chance of growing into a great athlete. So nutrition is key and nutrition is going to be the first thing that I would focus on.

Number two to raise that bar and push those limits up is setting goals. You want your kid to set goals above the bar, above their limits. The further up it is, it's going to be more of a dream. That's what I want. That's where it needs to be. Remember, it's that dream that's going to really drive them and push them. It's going to put some pressure on that limit and then hopefully raise the bar. Do not start with smart goals. Smart goals will keep you below the limit because smart goals are designed to be achievable, basically. It's something that you're capable of doing. We're trying to push the limits. Pushing the limits means you got to fight for what's not capable as of right now. So that's why I encourage you to make sure you have those dreams that are way above the bar and that you're fighting for those. That doesn't mean smart goals are bad. Smart goals will help you get to that main goal, get to that dream. But for starters, make sure you have a big dream, the big goal above your kid's capabilities. Because it's above their capabilities now. Hopefully over time, as they fight for it, it won't be out of the range of being capable of being achievable.

Number three, celebrate all the wins, and I'm not talking about the big wins like the games and those big tournaments or events. I'm talking about the little things as well. If they are a swimmer and they beat their personal record, their best time by a second, celebrate it. It doesn't have to be in a match or in the tournament or anything like that. Just make sure you celebrate your kid's accomplishments, even if they are small. And it doesn't have to be in sports alone, it could be in school, they do well on a pop quiz. Something small. They put their dishes away. I don't care what it is. If they start to see that they're being celebrated for those little things, it'll kind of get them looking forward to the next little win that they can accomplish or they can seize. So if they have that, then they're going to look for those little wins and they're going to want to push it and they'll have the confidence to because they know that they've had a little win in the past, and the more of those they have, the more confidence they're going to have, which means they're going to put a lot more pressure on that limit and that's what you want. So celebrate those wins.

Then number four, focus on the process. So we're celebrating their wins. That's great. And that's just part of the process, but they need to get comfortable with the other part. Failure. They need to get comfortable with failure because it's going to happen, especially when you're going to your limits. Things aren't going to work out exactly as planned, so they just need to be comfortable with that. One of the questions I always like to ask my athletes is how many times, do you know the number of times that you failed when you were trying to walk? How many attempts that you made just to walk. Nobody really knows that, and that's the point. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. Nobody cares. What your goal is, is to walk.

The process was, you've got to crawl and then you walk up to the couch, you prop yourself up, you're on your feet, you take the step, boom, you fall. That's just part of the process. And then you continue until you can take two to three steps. And as parents, we celebrated every step. Those first steps were huge because we knew that's the process and that's what we're doing with our athletes now. Even if they're teenagers, you're celebrating those steps and that process, and that's what we need to do is focus on the process, and that's my last point to helping push the limits.

So you want to make sure you provide them with the nutrients so that they can grow and continue to push those limits. But then you want to set those goals above the bar so that again, they have something to reach for putting pressure on that limit. And then third, make sure that you're celebrating those wins because that's going to help build confidence. They're going to also start looking for those wins. And then the last one again is the process. Make sure they are comfortable with not just winning, which is really comfortable, but comfortable with failure as well because that's just the process. And then we just continue to fight until again, not only can you walk, but you're running, and that's what we want for our kids. Hope that helps. Again, you know the drill. Hit that subscribe button if you haven't, and I hope you liked this video, give it a thumbs up if you did, and leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you. Until next time. Take care.