I am recently engaged into working as strength and conditioning coach in one tennis school in Belgrade with my good friend Ognjen who is my faculty coleague.
We deal with kids of variety of ages, from 12-17 and with different tennis experience and different movement skill ‘literacy’.
Altough I have joined-in recently, Ognjen have already developed some kind of a system, but we are trying together to develop LTAD for them, not including tennis skills which is the problem of tennis coaches.
I am just reading Canada LTAD (a free manual that can be downloaded) and I have already read Bompa ‘Total Training for young champions’ and Drabik ‘Childern and sport training’. I wonder is anybody developed simmilar stuff and have experince working with this issue willing to share his thoughts?
I know TopCat mentioned working on simmilar stuff and I am familiar with Charlie’s Edmonton LTAD (which I am going to use as a template).
I will post my thoughts, pictures and tables in due course since this is priority number one, but still demands a lot of time and experience, so it is going to be ‘work in progress anyway’.
I worked with a few tennis players at an academy like yours for a short while until i realised I couldn’t do anything as they were being destroyed by their coaches. Great to see you have some control. I think a structured program looking at what they do in tennis and then trying to avoid that or compensate for it in S&C is the way to go. It’s an interesting problem because you have to think upper and lower body. Specifically look at the forearm of the dominant hand in tennis. One of my friends arms was so developed he had moved the position of the ulnar and radius from where they should be a new position preventing him from straightening his arm at all. And all this by the age of 17!
I have finaly finished LTAD plan in rough lines (one huge table) and I am now dealing with individual components of that plan. I could post it but it is on serbian.
Said that, I am interested into material regarding ‘skill games’ aimed for 9-12 year olds (and younger) for the development of basic movement patterns (throw, kick, jump, pass, receive, blah,blah, blah) along with speed,agility and some tactical awareness. If anyone knows a good book on this subject please post. I have some serbian book (Elementary games)but it is basically collection of some ‘communistic’ games that makes me puke :). It seems that I have to do all things by myself,damn
try looking into books for phsyical education teacher games. Most have activities like “red light green light” etc. You can also PM me for a link to a very helpful product I use.
