Lindesy King will attend the Christian college Concordia this fall. But on this Good Friday evening, she’s lifting weights and huffing up an inclined treadmill at IntenseCity Sports Center in Irvine.
“It’s a real devotion,” said King, a basketball forward for Fountain Valley High. She says she can now jump 4 inches higher than she used to. “There’s someone practicing all the time. It’s what you have to do to get ahead.”
For her parents it’s worth the $3,000 a year for their two daughters.
“It” is one of several forms of high-intensity training quickly becoming a religion for more high school, junior high school and even elementary student-athletes. Once the sole purview of the pro athletes, the training techniques to make muscles react faster are the rage for athletes eager to earn athletic scholarships.
At Fast-Twitch training center in Brea, athletes might sit on a leg extension machine that is hooked up to a computer that evaluates how quick they raise their leg. The point is not to lift a heavy weight but to move it in quick repetitions.
Plyometrics, on the other hand, is a relatively low- tech form of training that involves jumping up boxes and fast foot movement. The exercises are designed to make the muscles as strong as possible in a short time, enabling an athlete to leap or make a cut more quickly.
At least some young athletes who use these techniques say they are jumping higher and running faster. “It’s the real deal,” Trabuco Hills senior Chris Baker said. The basketball, football and tennis player was training at IntenseCity when he saw a pro football player wheezing on the inclined treadmill. “He was dying. So we must be doing something right.”
Baker said he has gained 3 inches on his vertical leap after just a few weeks of riding the treadmill and jumping on boxes.
But the training centers can extract a steep price of hundreds or thousands of dollars. Some coaches are wary.“Everyone says they have the secret,” Mater Dei football coach Bruce Rollinson said. “I think parents need to investigate the financial output vs. the results.”
Also, doctors say high-intensity workouts can foster overtraining that can lead to injury. That’s particularly true for young athletes still growing. “You can’t train a 15-, or 14-year-old the way you train a 25 –year-old,” said Dr. Carlos Prietto, an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in sport medicine at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
Prietto said young athletes need more rest that older ones, both at night and between activities. And pre-adolescents and teen-agers spend a considerable amount of their available energy growing, doctor’s say. Too much time training and practicing without rest eventually can retard growth.
Dan Michael Cooper, an UCI pediatrician on a National Institute of Health grant to study children and sports training, said the high-intensity is “dangerous. It’s a fad like taking over the counter drugs or steroids to get the competitive edge.” He said while hard data isn’t in yet, he has seen increases in overuse injuries for young athletes. “America is like this, either kid’s aren’t doing anything or they are burning themselves out on these fads” said Cooper of UCI. “Parents have to be careful about entering kids in these programs.”
COMPETITIVE EDGE
It’s hard to disagree that some athletes are getting a competitive edge, sometimes at state-of –the art facilities.
The posh 36,000-square-foot IntenseCity sports environs boast the usual weight training equipment as well as an inclined running machine designed to improve “power,” the buzz-word of the high-intensity workouts. At plyometric sessions, athletes jump on bigger and bigger boxes and move quickly over a floor grid that looks a lot like hopscotch squares as trainers look on.
IntenseCity opened three years ago to train the Mighty Ducks and Angels. It wasn’t long before the operators started marketing their methods to younger athletes, trainer Jim Clapper said.
“If you can train and work with elite athletes at their level, we thought you could take it down to young athletes who want to be elite athletes.”
At Laguna Niguel YMCA, PlyoCity director Mike Rangel takes a different tack. He leads 45 or more young athletes through a series of stretching, fast footwork and conditioning. The two-hour session ends with mental visualization. Athletes lie on the floor as Rangel leads them through exercises in the mind. Rangel, a former high school coach, said the group generates a collective energy and helps inspire the younger athletes to work harder. The workouts cost anywhere from $75 to $125 a month. He says he gives a break to kids who can’t pay.
Approaches are different but the desired results are the same: to hone the muscles that help basketball players leap higher for rebounds and runners explode off the starting blocks.
EXERCISE TO EXCESS?
Such concentrated workouts dovetail with the Orange County sports scene that grows increasingly competitive with parents ever eager to see their young athletes excel, and hopefully, earn an athletic scholarship, even be an Olympian or a pro.
Parents and their athletes who want to succeed are under more pressure to fill a young athlete’s days with club games and practice, and now, high-intensity training.
“The Greek idea of Pandea, or ‘free play,’ is lost,” said Prietto. “It’s a matter of excess in what they’re doing. The injury is related to how much they work.”
Does a child need high-intensity training to get a scholarship? Clapper emphatically nods yes.
“You can’t get to the next level. Even the clubs and schools are so competitive. You need an edge to take it to the next level. Just playing your sport isn’t going to get you there. There’s other people competing for the same scholarship who are doing more.”
That message is hard to miss. Magazines such as “Basketball Digest” and “Slam” are filled with advertisements for plyometric shoes and videos to teach (“Get a 40-inch Vertical!”). Coaches on soccer and basketball club teams pass out brochures on high-intensity training. Athletes bring them home to parents.
Said Rollinson: “They’re all in the business to make money off the parents who have the financial wherewithal to spend additional money to train their sons.”
WORTH THE MONEY
But some of those sons, and daughter, say they are seeing impressive results. Steve Alaminiana, a junior free safety at Los Alamitos, said he started reacting more quickly in the defensive backfield in his first year working at Fast-Twitch in Brea.
Steve’s father, Steve Sr., who pays more than $600 for 48 Fast-Twitch sessions on top of his son’s health club membership, said he hopes the extra training will get his son a scholarship. “He got as far as he could with his natural ability,” said Steve Sr. “He needed a little more technology.”
Others have more modest goals. “I want to get good at football,” said Russell Scott, a 15 year freshman at Brea Olinda, “so I can knock the other guys on their butts.”
A lot of parents can’t pay the price for the workouts. Others swallow hard and open their wallets. Debbie Cozzolino spent out about $1500 for six weeks of workouts for two high school age daughters after they assured her they were serious about developing their soccer skills, “ That was a big thing, believe me,” Cozzolino said. “That was a really big consideration. That’s a big chunk of money.”
Some parents eschew the special centers and run their own training programs. Travis Wittick, 13, uses duct tape on the ground and store-bought equipment to do his twice weekly plyometric workout in the family back yard of his parents’ Rancho Santa Margarita home. “He’s very disciplined,” mother Lynn Wittick said.
KEEPING IT IN HOUSE
Not all athletes are, Rollinson, like many coaches, prefers to run a plyo workout within his football program to control the conditioning and parental expense. Tustin football coach Myron Miller said his kids can’t afford a place like IntenseCity. He developed his own program. But he’s a believer: “If you can take a 300-pound lineman and get him to jump on a 36-inch box, he’s going to jump off the line with a lot more explosiveness.”
Coaches like Mike Ford, the coach of the Los Alamitos girl’s basketball team, encourage kids to try Plyo-City or IntenseCity, if their parents can afford it. But doctor’s stress it’s easy to overdo the training, easy to burn out on too much training too young. Overall, doctors say obesity is a much bigger problem than overtraining. But parents have to be careful.
Said Prietto: “I have seen some good results from people who know what they’re doing. The thing is we do see injuries if the kids don’t rest.”
|
