Youth Athletic Development in Toronto

Parents tend to arrive with the same question. My kid plays a sport, should they also be in a gym, and if they should, what ought they to be doing in there? Here is how athletic development is run at Kinetic Haus, what changes between the off-season and the competitive season, and where a young athlete fits on our floor.

Development is not more of the sport

Our athletic training and Performance Centre runs private, semi-private and group training, in-season and off-season athlete and team training, and injury rehab and pain management. Youth, elite-amateur and professional athlete programs run in small group and team settings, which matters more for a fifteen year old than it sounds: the room is other athletes doing the same work, coached, rather than an adult general fitness class they have wandered into. The outline is on the performance page.

A season already supplies plenty of running, plenty of repetition and plenty of fatigue. What it rarely supplies is the other half of the job: the ability to accelerate and slow down under control, to change direction on one leg, to absorb a landing, to produce force from the positions the game actually asks for, and to hold a decent shape when tired. Those qualities get trained deliberately or they do not get trained at all, and a training floor is where they are trained.

Off-season and in-season are two different jobs

The off-season

Off-season is when the raw qualities get built, because it is the one stretch of the year when training can be the hardest thing in the week. Strength goes up through progressive loading and compound movement. Power and speed work follow, because force you cannot apply quickly is of limited use in a game. Work capacity gets built so the athlete arrives at camp able to train, rather than spending the first month getting fit enough to train.

Our Kinetic 30 Challenge on the performance page shows the same logic in public form. Volume 1 is a strength block, Volume 2 a power sprint, Volume 3 an endurance push, and each runs across a couple of months with tiers at three, four or five sessions a week. Blocks with a clear job, run long enough to produce an adaptation, then changed.

The competitive season

In-season the job changes completely. The sport is now the main stimulus and the gym becomes support. Total training volume comes down, sessions get shorter, intensity is kept honest so the qualities built over the summer are still there in March, and the whole thing is scheduled around games rather than in competition with them. Keeping the athlete fresh is the point. This is ordinary practice in strength coaching rather than anything proprietary, and it is why the same athlete's programme in November looks nothing like their programme in July.

Strength work for a young athlete

Supervised, well coached resistance training is a normal part of preparing for sport. Canada's 24-Hour Movement Guidelines, published by the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology, recommend at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity a day for children and youth, including muscle and bone strengthening activities on at least three days a week. Age on its own is a poor guide to readiness. A coach looks at technique, at how an athlete organises themselves under a light load, and at what they can control, then loads from there.

In practice the first sessions go on positions rather than numbers, loading climbs across weeks rather than inside a single hour, and an athlete who cannot yet hold a shape is given a version they can hold. Coaches here work in rooms small enough to see it. Sleep, school, growth and a heavy game schedule all change what a session should be that week, and a coach adjusts the target rather than defending the plan.

When the clinic gets involved

Young athletes turn up sore, and telling ordinary training soreness apart from something worth looking at is not a parent's job. The therapy team works in the same building, so an assessment is a walk across the floor rather than a referral into the unknown. The clinic is assessment-first: intake and a movement assessment, then a plan, then guided rehabilitation alongside the training. Mary Lalancette, our Clinic Director, is an Osteopathic Manual Practitioner, Certified Athletic Therapist and RMT with close to twenty years of work with varsity, professional and national level athletes. Tina Szeto is an Osteopathic Manual Practitioner and Athletic Therapist, and Dr. Jess Pontarollo is our physiotherapist. Their backgrounds are on the team page.

Nobody here will tell a teenager to push through pain that has not been assessed. If something is irritable, the therapist decides what is allowed and the coach fills the space that leaves.

How to start

Athlete and team programmes are quoted around what a squad or an individual needs, so they are arranged by email rather than bought from a page. Write to info@kinetichaus.com with the sport, the level, the competition calendar and anything a coach should know about injury history. Older athletes who simply want to train in a group can start with a class instead: the ten formats are on the classes page, plans and packs are on the pricing page, and a first class is free. We are at 107 Orfus Rd, Toronto, M6A 1M4, in the Yorkdale area of North York, open 6am to 9pm on weekdays and 8am to 6pm at weekends. Classes and memberships are booked on bsport. Clinic appointments are booked separately on Jane.