(Re)Setting goals
Everything you do in sports should be oriented towards a goal. Do you want to jump higher, run faster, feel better or simply learn a new skill. Having a clear goal will serve as a lighthouse that guides you through, often, difficult training sessions.
What is a good goal?
A good goal is anything that keeps you motivated for practice. It can be quite tricky to set a good goal. If you are to cautious, you won’t get the satisfaction of achieving something. On the other hand if you are very ambitious, it can take you months of work to reach your goal. With your goal always being somewhere in the future, your motivation will start to decline rapidly. That’s why adding smaller milestones along the way is key.
Adding a race just to see if the form is improving, performing some kind of test workouts which are always the same but with a variable intensity component or something similar can keep your motivation high and workouts fun.
What about children?
Children are whole different problem. Even kids grouped by age can vary in skill greatly. Someone born in January of any give year has a clear advantage over someone born in October of the same year. The younger the child is the more the differences are pronounced.
That’s why it’s important to set effort based goals for children rather than performance based ones.
You were 7th? Amazing!
If one of your young athletes finished 7th out of 8 in a race, instead of focusing on the placement, compliment them for finishing within a timeframe you expected of them: “19.5 seconds! I never thought you can run under 20.”.
Now the child has an objective benchmark for their next race. If they can beat it, they will be over the moon and you will have an eager athlete working hard and enjoying themselves.
Just come up with a metric.
We were doing some balance exercises and one of the kids got really frustrated: “I fell down like 100 times. All the other are way better.”, he said. “I bet you can’t finish the next segment with just 99 falls!” was my reply.
We started another round and he only stumbled 4 times. “What?! Only 4 times. That’s an amazing improvement!”
Next thing you know, the kid was working hard and having a great time. He fell a bunch of times but got back up right away with focus and determination in their eyes.
By moving the spotlight from his peers towards himself, he could suddenly gauge his improvement and celebrate small victories as they came along. A few more times and they all will be standing on 1 leg and juggling 3 balls with just one eye open.
Until then,
Stay healthy
