3 TIPS TO MAKE YOUR CHILD FASTER THIS WEEKEND

Often my articles are about ways to make you or your child better over time. Let’s face it. You don’t reap your rewards from training instantly. It’s the accumulation of work, rest and the bodies natural process of supercompensation that allows us to improve.

If you want instant results, then you need to focus more on developing skills. And to do that, having a coach to push you is so important. That’s where you, the parent (the ultimate coach) comes in.

It’s easy for us parents to get stuck in the groove of just yelling “PEDAL” louder than the other parents and that’s where the coaching stops. Others will hire the young local pro to help their kids. But often those local pro’s just do their thing and they find success, but haven’t really thought too much about how they got so fast and thus don’t teach others with much success.

I was that young pro at one time. Now looking back at the times parents paid me to “train” their child, I want to find them and give their money back. Now as a more mature (old as sh**) rider/coach, I have to be much more thoughtful at what it actually takes to make someone better.

3 Ways To Improve Your Young BMXers This Weekend

1. Improve Track Speed

Believe it or not, yelling “PEDAL, PEDAL, PEDAL” isn’t a good strategy for making them go faster. We need to come up with a better way to achieve the speed. So how about we challenge them? Give them a clear objective. This is one of my favorite ways to challenge a rider.

Play Catch Up

Challenge your rider in a moto or even a main event at a local race to coast out of the gate and let the other riders get a big lead. Then it’s their job to catch the pack and pass as many people as possible. If winning national main events is the eventual goal, then use local races to push their comfort zones further than they thought possible.

Rather than just telling them to go faster and using their conscious brain. They now have a clear objective (catch the pack) and they can get into more of an unconscious part of their brain (flow state) and just do their thing. The best performances in sports history were done in that flow state.

2. Challenge Their Technical Abilities

Much like the first tip, pushing their abilities is the name of the game to improve. Rather than unconscious practice like the previous tip, now we are consciously practicing one particular jump or section.

This can be a jump that they have never jumped before, pedal over a jump they previously thought was impossible. Or you could challenge and reward them for double manualing in a rhythm section. It doesn’t even have to be the fastest line.

I like the idea of teaching riders adaptability rather than just pure speed. Challenge your rider to jump something during a race, even if it’s at the expense of a race win. If all your rider learns is to manual a jump and they get to a track that requires them to jump then at the very least they won’t be as confident and quite possibly scared of the track.

3. Slow Them Down To Go Faster

This tip goes along very well with the previous tip. Rather than just having them send a new jump for the first time and scaring them, have them dip their toes in the water first. Slowing down is also a great way to work on technique.

The gate start is one of the most important if not the most important aspects of BMX racing. It’s just human nature to give it everything we have during the start of the race but often it’s at the expense of good technique. My solution – slow down!

Before going fast, they need to show you that they can maintain good technique going slow. There’s a reason we start kids in tee-ball first and eventually progress to fast pitch baseball.

In one of my favorite coaching books of all time – The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills, Daniel Coyle highlights the fact that some of the great NFL quarterbacks still go over the basic mechanics often. He also studied great musicians who would play a song so slow that it was completely unrecognizable. Slowing down now is a great way to help someone speed up later.

Another great thing from this book is the idea of rather than tweaking your suboptimal skill, it’s better to just build a completely new one. Coyle uses the analogy of the tracks of snow skis. If you are following previous tracks, it’s difficult to change direction. You have an easier time getting completely out of those tracks and making fresh tracks.

To build a new skill, first, perform it as slowly as possible. When learning a new and better gate start (for example) you want to picture it and go through the motions at a speed that allows you to perform it 100% correctly. Any speed over that will just result in falling back into the rut of previous sub-optimal mechanics.

Way too often I see racers using bad technique while doing gate starts and to the first jump. Their bodies move around on the bike but they don’t look like they’re going anywhere. They are trying too hard and using bad mechanics. Have them slow down, use better form and you will be surprised by how quickly they improve.

Will slowing down cost us winning some races? Yeah maybe, but once again, that’s the beauty of using local races to practice your skills. Get over the fact that they may not win every local race if their ultimate goal is national-level success.