Why does sport stall in the teenage years and what’s the solution?

Most children experience a performance plateau in their middle teens – slightly earlier for girls.  Understanding why depends on knowing what drives skill development in pre-adolescence, and how adolescence changes the rules. 

Though there are exceptions, growth when we are young tends to enhance tools for movement.  At the same time, the immaturity of movement skills provides a strong flow of new information to the motor centres in the brain to build the ‘instruction manuals’ for movement.  The spontaneous extension of movement capacity combined with rapid motor learning means that simple biological growth is the basic driver of skill development in pre-adolescence.  The onset of puberty changes everything because when growth begins to slow in late adolescence, everything else slows down to.  

The connection between general athletic and specific sporting skills provides clues as to what can be done to keep things moving forward and it also explains why it most often doesn’t.

Let’s use the example of a young child learning to play football.  There are two discrete and complementary outcomes at work.  At one level, running around trying to kick a football enhances all facets in the act of running around: accelerating and decelerating, changing direction, capacity for exercise etc.  On another level the child is learning the specific skills associated with football. 

For young children, sport and athletic development is of mutual benefit but what happens to athletic development as the sporting skills reach a high degree of maturity?  Let’s go back to the example of the young footballer.  Early on, getting to the ball is the predominant feature of training and run skills are, consequently, the limiting factor.  The ratio of kicking to running is low.  As ball control improves, running ceases to be the limiting factor and ball control assumes more and more of the training focus.  From this point forward, the run stimulus is defined by what happens with the ball.  Athletic development becomes constrained because movement is increasingly specific and not general.  How does this explain a performance plateau?

The connection between the development of specific/ sporting skills and general athletic skills only appears to be mutual or circular because it is largely so when we are very young.  The connection is in fact vertical.  Basic movement skills are the ‘building blocks’ for specific or contextualised movements.  We can’t catch a moving ball without first being able to move, or without grasping skills.  In young children, ‘sport specific’ movement is only loosely so.  The immaturity of the brain and body means it is mostly general.  Athleticism determines the boundaries of what’s possible at the level of specific skills.  Consider two individuals at football training: one is much quicker than the other.  We can say that the additional quickness expands the range of possibilities with respect to ball control and tactical advancement.  Athleticism determines everything that is and is not.   

Adolescence/ puberty is not only the period during which the body stops growing but for talented young sports people it is also the time when sporting skills reach a high level of maturity and general athletic development begins to plateau.  In the absence of additional biological capacity and extension of athletic skills, an individual depends solely on finding marginal gains in comparatively advanced sporting skills.  That is beyond most individuals and most coaching environments and is the reason for the teenage performance plateau. 

The solution is to seek further development of athletic skills which, as we have discussed, were the building blocks of the sporting skills all along.  However, for the reasons explained, these can’t be ‘wrapped’ into the sport skills program.  They need to be targeted and conditioned separately.

You might have noticed something missing in my explanation of the causes of skill development: coaching.  Coaches like to believe (and I am one) that we are indispensable.  Without us children wouldn’t know which way round to put their swim suits on let alone how to swim!  This is bullshit pure and simple.  The biggest human influence on skill development is other sports people.  The greatest constructive influence coaches have is to engender a positive and productive environment.  This is not to say that coaches don’t provide useful feedback, they do.  The point is that most of what appears coach-driven is spontaneous and self-driven via the standards and modelling other individuals provide, biological growth, and athletic extension.  The gift of coaching is a framework that educates and inspires.