CEC
ARTICLE
TRAINING KIDS
FOR SPORTING DEVELOPMENT
By incorporating fundamental motor skills into children’s training and daily
activity, you can increase their sports proficiency.
WORDS: KELLY SUMICH
hildren do not automatically
become proficient at sports.
Some will be naturally more adept
than others, but they all need to be taught
fundamental motor skills and given the
opportunity to progress through stages.
C
Fundamental motor skill
development
Motor skills are voluntary, learnt movements
made by the human body to achieve a task,
such as a child twisting their body and
moving their arm to throw a ball. Sadly, a
recent study by the University of Sydney
found that children’s motor skill development
is on the decline. Only 10 per cent of children
in the research were able to master the four
expected gross motor skills of a basic sprint,
a vertical jump, a side gallop and a leap by
Year 2. These fundamental motor skills are
important to ensure children have the basic
skills needed to participate in sport.
The researcher, Dr Louise Hardy, was
quoted as saying that ‘parents mistakenly
believe that children naturally learn these
fundamental movement skills. But children
need to be taught them’.
So as a personal trainer, coach or parent,
what are the fundamental motor skills you
should focus on developing in the children
you train or care for?
Aim to incorporate skills such as running,
side-stepping, jumping, catching, throwing
and hitting a ball into children’s exercise
development programs. Jumping, throwing
and catching start to become more refined
around the ages of nine or 10, and hitting
at a later age – around 14. Create simple
games that incorporate these motor skills,
such as tying a ribbon around a higher item
and seeing if the children can jump and
touch it. Turning the activities into games
will encourage greater enthusiasm and
participation than simply getting them to run
back and forth over a distance.
Adjusting the difficulty of a
motor skill
Think about the sport of netball. If a child
is placed in a game without background
development in the fundamentals then they
will be overwhelmed. There is so much
happening: they need to run, catch, look for
someone to throw the ball to, work around
opponents, determine areas they can run
in and areas that are off limits. Netball has
a large number of ‘open motor skills’. This
means that the sporting environment has
many targets and objects in motion and/
or that they are in a constantly changing
environment. To make an activity easier,
environmental changes need to be restricted.
For example, you would start with the
child throwing the netball to another child,
42 | NETWORK SUMMER 2014