Athletics Canada and BC Athletics have been supporting the Long Range Athlete Development Program (click here for details in .pdf file) which has been in the making for the past few years.  Based on physiological studies of developing athletes it makes a number of recommendations as to what age various types of activities should be introduced into programs for young, developing athletes.  BC Athletics is trying to bring its programs into line with these ideas.

One of the stronger recommendations made was that athletes under the age of twelve should not be doing highly sustained aerobic activities (in athletics sprints of longer than 10 seconds) as their physiology is not geared for this type of activity and in fact it may be damaged in the longer term.  For this reason, BC Athletics has modified the events for competition for younger athletes by dropping the 200m and 400m races for the 9 and 10 year olds and the 200m hurdles for the 11 year olds and the medley relay for 9 and 10 year olds.  These events have been replaced by a 60m sprint for 9, 10 and 11 year olds.

The lower Island track clubs have made arrangements for Wynn Gmitroski to make a more detailed presentation of the Long Range Athlete Development program.  Wynn was involved in developing the program.

Tom Dingle

Events coordinator

Peninsula Track and Field Club

 

The following is an Email I received from Brent Fougner giving details of the talk.

From: "Brent Fougner" <bfougner@uvic.ca>
 Subject: Long Term Athlete Development

 

Hi Everyone, 

 

Just a reminder of the Long Term Development session that is planned for Thursday March 29th  7:00 pm – 9:00 pm in McKinnon Building rm. 150.  The McKinnon is the building at UVic that the pool and Gymnasium are located in.  Wynn Gmitroski will be our main speaker at the session with the following agenda:

 

  1. A brief overview of the entire LTAD for Athletics (click here for full details in .pdf file)
  2. Specifics on the “train to train “ phase of the LTAD  (this is the phase that most of our young club athletes are in)
  3. Facilitate question and answer / discussion.

 

It is recommended that all you coaches and interested parents attend this session. If you have copies of the LTAD please distribute them ahead of time so they can read and prepare any questions they might want to bring to the session.

 

I have told Wynn that one of our goals to working cooperatively in Victoria was having a common coaching philosophy amongst us.   

 

See you in two weeks

 

Brent Fougner

Pacific Athletics