Don't Sabotage the Future

There have been many times when I went to teach one of my upper level athletes a new skill and realized it is harder to teach than I thought because of bad habits, bad technique or just something I overlooked.

An example - I had a very talented kid.  I wanted him to learn a specific vault (a kasamatsu).  Super talented so should not be a problem - only there was a REALLY big problem - he twisted the wrong direction to learn a kasamatsu.  When he was little he just picked his direction to twist and I thought nothing of it then.  Had I known way back then about the repercusions the twisting decision would have on his vault, I would not had let a six year old just decide he wanted to twist left.  

Long story short  it was too late to make him change his twisting so we changed his round off on vault (like I said he was really talented.).  Which was a super long process.  He ended up learning a tsuk double (so didn't need the twist hah) as shown here.

There are countless things like that I wish I had known or been more stringent on my younger athletes years earlier.  Once you let someone get away with bad technique it becomes ingrained in them and becomes hard to fix! 

That's why its so important to know proper technique and most importantly know why its proper technique and what the repercussions are in the future.

It may not seem to matter that a kid on parallel bars pikes in his front swing because he's getting to handstand easy.  You know what, it doesn't matter for his swing handstand, but that pike will make it ten times harder for him to do a good stutz.

When we have new coaches at our gym, I wish I had a manual to just hand them so they would know how and why to teach a particular skill.  We didn't have one, so Coach Sean (@coachseands on insta) have decided to make them.  

We have been putting together all of our drills, notes, keys to skills and spotting techniques for our  coaches we hire or any new coach.  That's the purpose of our tutorials, to try to pass on the information we have learned to make your job and your athletes job a lot easier.  (Example below of spotting a diamadov)

Learn from our mistakes.  We have both been blessed to be coaching a long time and learned from some of the best coaches around.  Its time we pass that information to you.

Check out the tutorials, there will be more coming!  The latest is on parallel bar support skills.  If you ever have a question just hit us up! If you have a cool drill - let us know - we always want to learn.  Or if you have a request for a particular skill we will do everything we can to get you information.

Thanks!

Coach Keith