CrossFit Athletic Group

Thanks to the Kavanaughs country-music-blaring Jeep, I was able to make a late-night run to Target on Monday to buy more Spiderman plastic balls to bring to the Day Care this week. They came in handy because we ended up having two classes of 10 on Thursday, and everyone was able to get a ball.

This week we did throwing, and a lot of it. 

Most of the time, I just handed them out and the kids started to throw them anywhere they could. Then I told them to throw it to me or the other teacher present and I would throw it past them so they would have to run to get it. It's pretty much like playing fetch with four-year-old kids (which sounds horrible, but whatever). That usually escalated into some expression of dodgeball where the teacher and I were the targets. Overall, the three year-olds lasted about 5 minutes until their attention ran out and the four-year olds lasted about 10 minutes. But in both cases, every kid appeared to throw better at the end of the session than they did at the start. And the interesting thing is, there was no formal coaching.

Formal coaching - Summer 2013

Real movement is natural. Throwing, running, jumping, climbing - all of those things happen pretty fluidly without any kind of real instruction.

You know what isn't natural? Push-ups with elbows in, squat cleans from the ground, kettlebell swings, kipping muscle-ups. Those movements only exist in the weight room. Nowhere else. They have been put in place because people go for so long without throwing, running, jumping and climbing that they forget those basic skills. Therefore they need to be taught - in a very formal way - how to move again.

I doubt I will ever get to teaching a push-up or hollow rock with this group, and I don't really think I need to. I'll bet they will do just fine for now without learning how to prioritize their midline. I think they need to experiment interacting with their environment as much as possible with minimal interference from anyone else. Once they get to the point where they can follow simple directions (which may never happen - as Mama V proves), then we can introduce formal movement teaching to assist whatever they are doing on the outside.

At this age, informality is the way to go.