Importance of Screening Young Athletes

Athletic screening on young athletes involves gaining a holistic understanding of where  athletes are in their physical development journey. It aims to track how they are progressing physically through their childhood, adolescence and into adulthood.

Through screening athletes at a young age, we are able to guide their development in order to provide the best possible opportunity for future success in their sport.

At Precision Athletica, we aim to improve how an athlete performs by getting them stronger, faster and more powerful. However, without a sound movement foundation, athletes may not optimise their ability to perform at their highest potential.

The ultimate goal of screening is to  help improve movement quality and increase the athlete’s ability to adapt to the required demands of their sport.

The advantages of screening young athletes include:

Identification of Motor Skill Competency

Movement efficiency is a term commonly used in high performance sports. It is the athlete’s ability to manipulate the body to perform a movement with the least amount of effort required.

In order to do so, athletes must have great control and understanding of how their body moves. From a young age, children begin to develop their gross motor skills such as running, jumping, throwing, kicking.

This phase of exploration and learning helps to build strong foundations for the learning of more complex skills later in life. By screening their movement competency, we are able to nurture the development of these skills so that they are able to perform more complex sport specific skills as they grow older.

Furthermore, those that have movement competency are more likely to participate and continue participating in sport which further increases the possibility of future success.

Determine the Athlete’s Physical Growth and Maturity

How often do you see a more physically mature 13 year old who is a head taller than their opponent dominating in sports such as basketball.

It is important to accept that athletes develop physically at different rates. How old they are biologically can be very different to how old they are chronologically (years since date of birth). If young athletes grow at different rates, it is most likely that their development in sport will follow the same trend.

By screening where they are relative to their peak height velocity (period of greatest acceleration in physical growth and stature), we are able to facilitate training that will benefit them at their stage of development.

Reducing the Risk of Injury

As athletes grow, their access to wider varieties of sports increases resulting in them participating in more than one sport and sometimes more than one sport at once. Furthermore, representative selection begins resulting in athletes participating in even more sessions throughout the week from school, to club to representative level sport.

This increase in participation may lead to the athlete doing more than what their body is physically capable of, leading to overload injuries.

By screening movement and working on movement quality over time, athletes begin to move more efficiently, and with the right education around training volume, their risk of overload injuries decrease.

At Precision Athletica, our Junior Athlete Movement Assessment entails 3 parts:

• Anthropometry to assess and track physical growth
• Gross Motor Skill Testing to assess for general physical development
• Gym-based Movement Patterns Testing to assess their movement competency in movements you would typically find in a Strength and Conditioning program. In doing so, we are able to prepare them for structured gym based training which they are likely to experience at some stage of their athletic journey at Precision Athletica or elsewhere. 

If you would like to know more about the Junior Athletic Movement Assessment, please contact our Exercise Physiologist Justin Trang.

Note, the Junior Athletic Movement Assessment can be done by all juniors – you do not need to be a regular Precision Athletica athlete to come and undergoing the assessment.

How Do I Book An Appointment with Precision Athletica for Help?

We’re taking the health of our clients, members and staff very seriously and our preference would be for you to call to book an appointment so that we can make sure to explain our approach to keeping you safe. You can call our bookings team to schedule a session:

• Customer Support Centre: 02 9764 5787
• OR email us at: olympicpark@precisionathletica.com.au

Online Consultations

Evolving with the current environment, we are also now offering online appointments, meaning that we can support anyone who is unable to leave their home. Sessions are done via our state of the art Telehealth system and as long as you have a laptop or tablet with an inbuilt camera, or a phone with camera, we can help!

To learn more about online consultations, please call us on any of the numbers listed above.