By Cameron Van Rooyen
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been moving. Whether it was kicking a rugby ball around on the fields after school, riding our bikes around the neighbourhood until the lights came on (yes that still happened in the 90s), playing cricket matches on Saturday mornings or dancing at my parents’ “braais” showing the old ballies my latest moves… I have kept moving. So, as a coach, I am thankful.
For decades, researchers have published articles and papers on motor control within the human body. I always say, “kids are sponges,’’ meaning they absorb, interpret and mimic movements faster than any adult. Their rate of motor development is off the charts.
Yes, there may be a certain element of talent to pick up unique movements and skills, but the fact remains, the longer you repeat any skill or set of movements, the better you become at it.
It absolutely amazes me, at the time taken for some of my students to perform a skill. Of course, there is refinement and practice needed, but basic movements have been understood and replicated rather quickly. The most exciting part of all of this is that these students have or currently play a multitude of sports and some are not even related to golf.
Any gross and fine motor skills that we learn through action will both enhance and develop our brain’s ability to control our muscles, which in turn makes us more dexterous with those body parts. For example, a child who grows up playing football will find it just as easy to learn how to ski in the Alps for their 50th birthday, as would a child who grew up dancing. Obvious? OK… What about golf and high jump? Tennis and football? Ice skating and and and… The truth is every sport would.
Developing a good sense of what we call the ABC’s (agility, balance and coordination), early on in life will benefit your physical capacity to learn new things and maintain quality of movement late into life.
Think of it like this. We live on a farm in the middle of a wheat field and there is no road in or out. We decide to go to the grocery store which is, for arguments sake, in a westerly direction. We grab a sickle and start chopping through the field, all the way to the supermarket. The road is now open. It is still rocky, bumpy, and filled with possible bread. Bear in mind, the time we took to get there and how many times we had to look at the compass. Two days pass and we decide we need to make another trip. This time we need butter. So, we set off again, only now we have no need for a compass and the road is a little less bumpy because the wind blew all the chopped wheat away. Over time, the sandy road turns into a tarred one and if we keep going back to the same store over and over again, it becomes a superhighway with flying cars.
This is how the motor end plates in our muscles and transmitting of neurons work, within our nervous system. The brain makes high-speed connections to our most visited locations or which muscles we use more often. There is no such thing as muscle memory, it is the brain gaining better control of the muscles in your body because that muscle is growing more muscle fibres through exercise. This creates the ability for you to fire more neurons from the brain to the muscle to engage the muscle with the most efficiency that it can handle. In the case of the wheat field, that first road that we created, could possibly be us learning how to breathe, hence why breathing is known as an involuntary or autonomous action.
Everything we learn to do physically would be building new roads to a new destination, in every direction and what we really want is for all of them to be as highspeed as possible. The only way we do this is by revisiting those sites as frequently as possible. The problem however is time. Doing the same thing over and over again, would inherently make you a master at that movement, but how much time would that take? 10 000 hours! Shew… best we get started.
I think we can all attest to the fact that staying active from an early age will increase your quality of life as an adult. Just look at the list of benefits – from increased bone health, tendon health, muscle mass and strength, cartilage health and decreased fat %. Reduction of cancer side-effects, cardiovascular disease, blood pressure and increased immune system function and sleep quality.
However, sport has shown to improve overall cognitive function and reduce the symptoms of anxiety, depression and insomnia. It’s true. An active child is a happy child. Children learn the best through play. They explore their physical capabilities, they interact with peers, they win, they lose, they cry, they fall and they get back up again. For me personally, it teaches us almost every fundamental skill needed to navigate this world efficiently. The physical component builds our ABC’s which has many benefits, but it’s the other stuff that’s the real winner.
Sportsmanship and comradery help children learn unique social and life skills, that in my experience, slice them a cut above the rest going into adulthood. The trick is finding the activities they enjoy and developing them into overall athletes first. We have no real control in what our children will one day be interested in or become. We may influence them with our own interests and hobbies, but they are innately explorers and will forge their own paths. All we can do is encourage them and give them a platform to grow from. The best sportsmen and women in any discipline have all been athletes throughout their lives until specialising in a certain field.
It’s well known that Jonty Rhodes was a Springbok hockey player at school and AB de Villiers himself, could have possibly chosen any sporting career he wanted (I think he still plays off of a single figure Handicap). However, it’s not that playing hockey will directly make you better at playing golf, you still need to practice, but the skill sets you to acquire in one discipline will most definitely give you an advantage in learning and mastering a new one. There is no concrete evidence that specialising in your early years will turn you into the next Tiger Woods, it is actually associated with quite the opposite. Children who do not engage in multiple sports are more likely to suffer from injury, staleness and burnout.
When we train for a sport, we should not be following a program that is 100% sport-specific. This is even more true when we are young andgrowing. Training FMS (Fundamental Movement Skills) at a younger age will equip a child with all the necessary tools to explore their potential efficiently. FMS include pushing, pulling, lifting, crawling, sitting etc. Together with locomotion skills such as hopping, skipping, jumping and throwing, they form the basis of every movement we need to perform the sports we play. A child who learns how to use their body effectively can and will excel in their respective sports later on. A program like this will include fine and gross motor skills – The ABCs. This is why I believe the best way to develop a sports star is by developing them into an athlete first. It’s a holistic approach and you better start them young. PHOTO CREDITS: https://www.mytpi.com/articles/fitness/jordan_spieth_athlete_first
Cameron Van Rooyen Class A PGA Professional | Certified Level 2 TPI ( Titleist Performance Institute ) Junior Instructor Teaching Professional and Head Junior Coach at The Gary Player Golf Experience.
Cameron, aka Cam, Coach Cam or Van is a passionate, youth development coach, whose love for the game has given him the opportunity to travel and work in some amazing parts of the world. That love and the intrigue of understanding the human body and its capabilities has steered him into the direction that he follows today. As a coach, he believes in the business of fun – this is the first reason a child stays in sport and in upcoming editions of Junior Golfer SA, Coach Cam will be sharing his opinion on an array of topics that he hopes will help many growing golfers, follow the right path, seek proper advice and never stop having fun. He might even throw in some neat drills, tips and tricks… so stay tuned, while we start from the ground up.