optimal time to conceive a child for BMX…

When you are a kid your success early on in sports, specifically BMX racing is dependent on one big factor. It’s not the equipment. It’s not how loud the parents yell – PEDAL! More than likely it isn’t how many clinics you send your kid to. This is completely out of your child’s hands, and it’s something that you can’t do anything about.

It’s the time of year when you and your husband, wife, or baby momma/daddy hooked up. Other than great genetics, the date you were born will have more to do with success in a particular sport than the other factors. If you live in America and you were born around the first week in December, you hit the birthday BMX lottery!  So this blog article is all about the time of the year to fornicate so that you can maximize your future child’s success at the Grands in 7-8 years.

Just kidding, it’s not.

But this is a good moment for us as parents to realize that there are just some things out of our control when it comes to sports. We can, and should do our best to help them achieve athletic goals along the way. And the best way to do this (in my opinion) is to focus on the process and not freak out about the results. This is not to say that it’s impossible to do well if your birthday happens to fall on a certain date, but I want to give you some strategies to prevent them from being discouraged and maximize progress in their racing.

If my math is correct, a child who is 6 years and 364 days old has spent 16.6% more time on the planet than a kid who just turned 6. For a rapidly developing kid, this is HUGE!

Compare someone who just turned 16 years old to another kid who is about to turn 17 and the difference is only 6.2%. If you didn’t think about this before, now you can see why your child may have a tough time making the main at nationals every year just after his birthday.

So instead of freaking out about little Johnny not making the main the weekend after his birthday, you can turn relish in the fact that he gets to race kids that are older than him could be something that makes him better in the future. Initially, this is a tough pill to swallow. But in the long run, this can be a fantastic opportunity for him to accelerate his skills by rising to the challenge of racing faster, more mature kids.

With my training clients, I see this every year. I have to reassure the parents that their child will come around later in the year. Oftentimes, our strategy at this point switches from winning races to emphasizing skill development on and off the bike. Some of my favorite things to work on are bike skills like Jumping, along with their general athletic skills off the bike. If you want your kid to be a great rider, they will eventually need to be good at jumping. Not only that, they need to be physically strong and powerful too.

So instead of you or your child getting frustrated over a lack of results, use this opportunity to maximize skills and fitness. Here are 2 examples of skills to work on.

1 – JUMPING

TIPS FOR LEARNING TO JUMP

• Teach good body position first.

• Parents… remember they heal quickly.

• Try to refrain from overuse of the phrases “be careful” and “don’t hurt yourself”.

• Practice Bunnyhops off of curbs with flat pedals.

• Learn to keep the bike level.

• Practice on a small tabletop to gain confidence.

• Progress to a shallow double jump.

• Work up to bigger and bigger jumps.

• At local races, push your kids to get comfortable jumping during a race, even at the expense of a win.

• Once they get the hang of jumping, teach them to stay low and also be able to boost a jump as high as possible.

2 – FITNESS

GENERAL ATHLETICISM IS THE FOUNDATION FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE

• Fitness is developed over hours, days, and weeks of play, not through high-intensity exercise.

• Jumping, skipping, crawling, and climbing are all essential strength training and coordination exercises.

• Slow, controlled, coordinated movements are a prerequisite for fast, explosive, dynamic movements.

• Tumbling and gymnastics are highly underutilized in training.

• Off-the-bike training for young BMXers should look nothing like how fully mature, pro BMXers train.