Skinny kid gets stronger

[Sunflower]

My 13 year old son is a chip off the old ectomorphic block. We started The Program in October and hoped the extra strength would help skiing.

He didn't do an LP, we just put weight on the bar when his form looked right and he's increased his strength by a bit over 50% on all the lifts but DL which has been a clean double.

Its hard to tease out what was coaching and what was strength but I doubt he would have made the progress he's made without the lifting.

Its hard to exaggerate how much of an improvement 3.5 seconds is. This is from a little better than middle of the field to within spitting distance of the podium.

YouTube

Little sh#t makes it look easy.

[OZ-USF-UFGator]

We had a similar experience. My 13-14 year old daughter hit a 200 deadlift and 170 squat at a bodyweight of 135. Her basketball and soccer game improved markedly, along with endurance, confidence and speed. Now, I just need to find a way to get her upper body to catch up. Even with micro loading NLP and going to sets of 3, her bench never passed 80 pounds as 1 rep max. I've been working to get on the local SS coach's schedule for consultation.

[Sunflower]

Hambrick and Reynolds like to talk about the refining power of doing something hard. Getting the deadlift right was a real struggle at first and he hated it. By January we had figured out how to get it to work for him and it became his favorite lift. So a couple of months of really struggling with it.

There's a sticky point in the process of becoming a truly fast skier- going from one whose skis are "hooked up" most of the time to one whose skis are hooked up nearly all of the time- and it involves re-conceptualizing how the whole thing is supposed to feel. He was very frustrated and his times were stuck. He came at it this season stronger, a year older and, I think, confident that he could wrestle it to the ground. He had an openness to succeeding that wasn't present last year, some trust in the coaching process and it took one 45 minute lesson to move him to the new level.

This is the age at which young racer's times start looking like adult times if they are working at it. I can see the refining in the way he stands.

[poser]

I don’t compete, but Im a serious snowboarder -do a lot of big mountain freeriding. I can absolutely vouch for the contribution of being strong. In the deep powder riding, you are displacing a lot of snow every time you turn on a snowboard. Another thing I have observed is how much power I feel that I have in my stance when hauling ass in a squat stance. I have my bindings set in a way that replicate my squat stance: 23 inches apart at +\- 15 degree angles. I drop my center of gravity, shove my knees outwards and load my posterior chain. Some of these mountain descents are 3-4 thousand feet and take an hour. People complain about their quads screaming, but I don’t really experience that kind of fatigue. My legs can get tired, but I seldom get a lactic acid build up. I also feel like I have the ability to really apply pressure to the board when going fast by driving my knees and rolling my ankles out. That kind of torque really reduces the board chatter at high speed. I’ve tried to show this technique to a few people who just couldn’t wrap their head around it, but a friend who is a Crossfitter grasped that technique immediately and credited it to more stability at high speed. It seems to keep me more “glued” to the surface in certain situations and is really not very physically demanding if you have squat mechanics.

[Sunflower]

For me, felt like skiing on someone else's legs. PR's down the hill.

[jbackos]

Appearances can be deceiving when they apply to strength potential.

Larry Pacifico started out skinny. Ed Coan was a skinny little wrestler. Marvin Phillips was a skinny kid whose arm was severed and reattached.

[Sunflower]

I know you're right. I want my son to be ready when the "hormonal milieu" gets to the right stage. He's at the 18%-ile BMI-wise, 5'0", 82lb 8th grader and he's getting self-conscious about it. His maternal grandfather is one of those guys who, in his prime, could handle manhole covers like poker chips at 5'2". He thinks he got Grampa Harvey's height gene.

He's giving away 30lbs in his age group for ski racing; he knows he has to lift hard and eat like a powerlifter to ever get on the podium. He seems to want it; the field sizes drop dramatically from Under 14 to Under 16 because most kids are scared to lean into it the way he has learned to recently. Be interesting to see if he really has a taste for suffering in the off season.

I don't think he's quite ready for LP, though.