L.T.A.D.P.
1. Introduction
2. Sport For Life Philosophy For All Ages
3. 0-6 Year Old Program
4. Fundementals Ages 6-8 Years Old Program
5. Learn To Train Ages 8-11 Years Old Program
6. Train To Compete Ages 15 And Up
7. Train To Train Ages 15-18 Program
LONG TERM
ATHLETE DEVELOPMENT
PROGRAM
WHAT IS LTAD?
Long Term Athlete Development is a national program covering all sports, designed to encourage people to participate in a sports program over their entire lifetime. It is based on the physical, mental, emotional, and cognitive development of children and adolescents. The program is divided into 7 stages, each stage reflecting a different point in athlete development. The overall goal is to ensure physical literacy, as a base for excellence. In addition, it;
- builds physical literacy in all children, from early childhood to late adolescence by promoting quality daily physical activity in the schools and a common approach to developing physical abilities through community recreation and elite sport programs.
- promotes a healthy, physically literate nation whose citizens participate in lifelong physical activity.
- supports the four goals of the Canadian Sport Policy — Enhanced Participation, Enhanced Excellence, Enhanced Capacity, and Enhanced Interaction — and reflects a commitment to contribute to the achievement of these goals.
- ensures that optimal training, competition, and recovery programs are provided throughout an athlete’s career. provides an optimal competition structure for the various stages of an athlete’s development.
- integrates elite sport, community sport and recreation, scholastic sport, and physical education in schools.
- is ‘Made in Canada’, recognizing international best practices, research, and normative data.
N.B. Physical literacy means competency in fundamental motor skills and fundamental sport skills.
FOR A COMPLETE OUTLINE OF THE CANADIAN LTAD PROGRAM, VISIT THE WEB SITE AT
www.ltad.ca
ACTIVE FOR LIFE
Age: ANY AGE FOR MALES & FEMALES
The age of transition from competition sport to lifelong physical activity.
OBJECTIVE: A smooth transition from an athlete’s competitive career to lifelong physical activity and participation in sport.
Canada’s sport system should encourage athletes to
- move from one sport to another. For example, the gymnast becomes an aerial skier, the sprinter takes up bobsledding, or the 12-year-old basketball player discovers canoeing.
- move from one aspect of sport to another. For example, the middle distance runner becomes a guide runner for blind athletes or the cyclist rides tandem at the Paralympic Games.
- move from competitive sport to recreational activities such as hiking and cycling.
- move from highly competitive sport to lifelong competitive sport through age group competition such as Master’s Games.
- upon retiring from competitive sport, move to sport-related careers such as coaching, officiating, sport administration, small business enterprises, or media.
- move from competitive sport to volunteering as coaches, officials, or administrators.
A positive experience in sport is the key to retaining athletes after they leave the competition stream.
Sport must make a paradigm shift from cutting athletes to re-directing them to sports where they are pre-disposed to train and perform well.
ACTIVE START
Age: 0 - 6
OBJECTIVE: Learn fundamental movements and link them together into play.
Physical activity is essential for healthy child development. Among its other benefits, physical activity
- enhances development of brain function, coordination, social skills, gross motor skills,emotions, leadership, and imagination.
- helps children to build confidence and positive self-esteem.
- helps to build strong bones and muscles, improves flexibility, develops good posture and balance, improves fitness, reduces stress, and improves sleep.
- promotes healthy weight.
- helps children learn to move skillfully and enjoy being active.
Physical activity should be fun and a part of the child’s daily life, not something required. Active play is the way young children are physically active. Organized physical activity and active play are particularly important for the healthy development of children with a disability if they are to acquire habits of lifelong activity.
Because this is a period when children rapidly outgrow their mobility aids, communities need to find effective ways — equipment swaps or rentals, for example — to ensure that all children have access to the equipment they need to be active.
Active Start To-Do List
Provide organized physical activity for at least 30 minutes a day for toddlers and at least 60 minutes a day for preschoolers regardless of the weather.
Provide unstructured physical activity — active play — for at least 60 minutes a day, and up to several hours per day for toddlers and preschoolers. Toddlers and preschoolers should not be sedentary for more than 60 minutes at a time except while sleeping.
Starting in infancy, provide infants, toddlers, and preschoolers with opportunities to participate in daily physical activity that promotes fitness and movement skills. Provide parents and care givers with age-appropriate information.
Encourage basic movement skills — they do not just happen as a child grows older, but develop depending on each child’s heredity, activity experiences, and environment. For children with a disability, access to age and disability appropriate adapted equipment is an important contributor to success.
Focus on improving basic movement skills such as running, jumping, twisting, wheeling, kicking, throwing, and catching. These motor skills are the building blocks for more complex movement.
Design activities that help children to feel competent and comfortable participating in a variety of fun and challenging sports and activities. Ensure that games for young children are non-competitive and focus on participation.
Because girls tend to be less active than boys and children with a disability less active than their peers, ensure that activities are gender-neutral and inclusive so that active living is equally valued and promoted for all children.
FUNdamentals
Age: males 6-9; females 6-8
Objectives: Learn all fundamental movement skills and build overall motor skills.
Skill development in the FUNdamentals stage should be well-structured, positive, and FUN!
The first window of accelerated adaptation to speed occurs at ages 6 to 8 for girls and 7 to 9 for boys. Bypassing the specialized skill development in the FUNdamentals stage is detrimental to the child’s future engagement in physical activity and sport.
No periodization takes place; however, all programs are structured and monitored.
If children later decide to leave the competitive stream, the skills they acquire during the FUNdamentals stage will benefit them when they engage in recreational activities, enhancing their quality of life and health.
FUNdamentals To-Do List
Practice and master fundamental movement skills before sport-specific skills are introduced.
Emphasize the overall development of the athlete’s physical capacities, fundamental movement skills, and the ABC’s of athleticism: agility, balance, coordination, and speed.
Teach appropriate and correct running, wheeling, jumping, and throwing techniques using the ABC’s of athletics.
Emphasize motor development to produce athletes who have a better trainability for long-term sport specific development. Introduce basic flexibility exercises.
Develop speed, power, and endurance using games.
Develop linear, lateral, and multi-directional speed with the duration of repetitions less than 5 seconds.
Include strength training exercises using the child’s own body weight as well as medicine ball and Swiss ball exercises.
Ensure that sporting and disability equipment are size, weight, and design appropriate and that explore ways to share and provide access to appropriate equipment.
Encourage participation in a wide range of sports communities
Introduce children to the simple rules and ethics of sports.
Ensure that activities revolve around the school year and are enhanced by multi-sport camps during summer and winter holidays.
Participate once or twice a week if children have a preferred sport, so long as there is participation in many other sports 3 or 4 times per week to ensure future excellence.
LEARN TO TRAIN
Age: males 9-12; females 8-11
Objective: Learn overall sports skills.
One of the most important periods of motor development for children is between the ages of 9 and 12. This is a window of accelerated adaptation to motor co-ordination.
Early specialization in late specialization sports can be detrimental to later stages of skill development and to refinement of the fundamental sport skills.
At this stage, children are developmentally ready to acquire the general sports skills that are the cornerstones of all athletic development.
Learning to Train To-Do List
Further develop all fundamental movement skills and teach general, overall sports skills. Otherwise, a significant window of opportunity is lost, compromising the ability of the young player/athlete to reach full potential.
Develop strength using exercises that incorporate the child’s own body weight as well as Medicine balls and Swiss balls.
Introduce hopping and bounding exercises or routines, or wheeling up gradients, to aid in strength development.
Further develop endurance through games and relays.
Further develop flexibility through exercises.
Further develop speed by using specific activities that focus on agility, quickness, and change of direction during the warm-up.
Structure competition to address differences in training age and abilities.
Identify sports the child enjoys and is predisposed towards success. Narrow the focus to 3 sports.
Introduce single periodization noting that some sports such as swimming and tennis need to use double periodization to adequately address the sport’s unique needs.
Apply a ratio of 70 per cent training to 30 per cent competition. The 30 per cent ratio includes competition and competition-specific training. These percentages vary according to sport and individual specific needs. Athletes undertaking this type of preparation are better prepared for competition in both the short- and long-term than those who focus solely on winning.
Encourage unstructured play.
Training to Compete
Age: male 16-23 +/-; 15-21 +/-
MIDGET +
Objectives : Optimize the engine and learn to compete.
Optimize fitness preparation and sport-, individual-, and position-specific skills as well as performance.
All the objectives of Training to Train must be achieved before the objectives of Training to Compete can begin.
Training to Compete To-Do List
Provide year-round, high intensity, individual event, and position-specific training.
Teach athletes, who are now proficient at performing basic and sport specific skills, to perform those skills under a variety of competitive conditions during training.
Place special emphasis on optimum preparation by ‘modelling’ high competitions in training.
Individually tailor to a greater degree fitness programs, recovery programs, psychological preparation, and technical development.
Emphasize individual preparation that addresses each athlete’s individual strengths and weaknesses.
Select 1 sport.
Utilize single, double, and triple periodization as the optimal framework of preparation.
Change the training-to-competition and competition-specific training ratio to 40:60. Devote 40 per cent of available time to the development of technical and tactical skills and improving fitness and 60 per cent of training to competition and competition-specific training.
TRAIN TOTRAIN
Age: male 12-16; females 11-15 (PEE WEE/BANTAM)
(age ranges are PHV dependent)
Objectives: Build an aerobic base, develop speed and strength towards the end of the stage, and further develop and consolidate sport specific skills.
During Training to Train, young athletes consolidate their basic sport-specific skills and tactics. This is a window of accelerated adaptation to aerobic, speed, and strength training. Optimal aerobic trainability begins with the onset of PHV, the major growth spurt during maturation.
During competitions, athletes play to win and to do their best, but the major focus of training is on learning the basics as opposed to competing.
Training to Train To-Do List
Make aerobic training a priority after the onset of PHV while maintaining or further developing levels of skill, speed, strength, and flexibility.
Emphasize flexibility training given the rapid growth of bones, tendons, ligaments, and muscles.
Consider the 2 windows of accelerated adaptation to strength training for females: the first occurs immediately after PHV and the second begins with the onset of menarche. For males, there is 1 window and it begins 12 to 18 months after PHV.
Note that both aerobic and strength trainability are dependent on the maturation levels of the athlete. For this reason, the timing of training emphasis differs depending on whether athletes are early, average, or late maturers.
Learn to cope with the physical and mental challenges of competition.
Introduce athletes with a disability to sport-specific equipment such as wheelchairs and athletic prostheses. For all athletes, the use of body-size and skill-level appropriate equipment remains important.
Optimize training and competition ratios and follow a 60:40 per cent training to competition ratio. Too much competition wastes valuable training time and conversely, not enough inhibits the practice of technical/tactical and decision-making skills.
Use talent identification to help athletes focus on 2 sports.
Utilize single and double periodization as the optimal framework of preparation.
Train athletes in daily competitive situations in the form of practice matches or competitive games and drills.
The Learn to Train and Training to Train stages are the most important stages of athletic preparation. During these stages, we make or break an athlete!
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