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Lindesy King will attend the Christian college Concordia
this fall. But on this Good Friday evening, she’s
lifting weights and huffing up an inclined treadmill
at IntenseCity Sports Center in Irvine.
“It’s a real devotion,” said King,
a basketball forward for Fountain Valley High. She says
she can now jump 4 inches higher than she used to. “There’s
someone practicing all the time. It’s what you
have to do to get ahead.”
For her parents it’s worth the $3,000 a year for
their two daughters.
“It” is one of several forms of high-intensity
training quickly becoming a religion for more high school,
junior high school and even elementary student-athletes.
Once the sole purview of the pro athletes, the training
techniques to make muscles react faster are the rage
for athletes eager to earn athletic scholarships.
At Fast-Twitch training center in Brea, athletes might
sit on a leg extension machine that is hooked up to
a computer that evaluates how quick they raise their
leg. The point is not to lift a heavy weight but to
move it in quick repetitions.
Plyometrics, on the other hand, is a relatively
low- tech form of training that involves jumping up
boxes and fast foot movement. The exercises are designed
to make the muscles as strong as possible in a short
time, enabling an athlete to leap or make a cut more
quickly.
At least some young athletes who use these techniques
say they are jumping higher and running faster.
“It’s the real deal,” Trabuco Hills
senior Chris Baker said.
The basketball, football and tennis player was training
at IntenseCity when he saw a pro football player wheezing
on the inclined treadmill. “He was dying. So we
must be doing something right.”
Baker said he has gained 3 inches on his vertical leap
after just a few weeks of riding the treadmill and jumping
on boxes.
But the training centers can extract a steep price of
hundreds or thousands of dollars. Some coaches are wary.
“Everyone says they have the secret,” Mater
Dei football coach Bruce Rollinson said. “I think
parents need to investigate the financial output vs.
the results.”
Also, doctors say high-intensity workouts can foster
overtraining that can lead to injury. That’s particularly
true for young athletes still growing.
“You can’t train a 15-, or 14-year-old the
way you train a 25 –year-old,” said Dr.
Carlos Prietto, an orthopedic surgeon who specializes
in sport medicine at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
Prietto said young athletes need more rest that older
ones, both at night and between activities. And pre-adolescents
and teen-agers spend a considerable amount of their
available energy growing, doctor’s say. Too much
time training and practicing without rest eventually
can retard growth.
Dan Michael Cooper, an UCI pediatrician on a National
Institute of Health grant to study children and sports
training, said the high-intensity is “dangerous.
It’s a fad like taking over the counter drugs
or steroids to get the competitive edge.”
He said while hard data isn’t in yet, he has seen
increases in overuse injuries for young athletes.
“America is like this, either kid’s aren’t
doing anything or they are burning themselves out on
these fads” said Cooper of UCI. “Parents
have to be careful about entering kids in these programs.”
COMPETITIVE EDGE
It’s hard to disagree that some athletes are
getting a competitive edge, sometimes at state-of –the
art facilities.
The posh 36,000-square-foot IntenseCity sports environs
boast the usual weight
training equipment as well as an inclined running machine
designed to improve “power,” the buzz-word
of the high-intensity workouts. At plyometric sessions,
athletes jump on bigger and bigger boxes and move quickly
over a floor grid that looks a lot like hopscotch squares
as trainers look on.
IntenseCity opened three years ago to train the Mighty
Ducks and Angels. It wasn’t long before the operators
started marketing their methods to younger athletes,
trainer Jim Clapper said.
“If you can train and work with elite
athletes at their level, we thought you could take it
down to young athletes who want to be elite athletes.”
At Laguna Niguel YMCA, Plyo-City director Mike Rangel
takes a different tack. He leads 45 or more young athletes
through a series of stretching, fast footwork and conditioning.
The two-hour session ends with mental visualization.
Athletes lie on the floor as Rangel leads them through
exercises in the mind. Rangel, a former high school
coach, said the group generates a collective energy
and helps inspire the younger athletes to work harder.
The workouts cost anywhere from $75 to $125 a month.
He says he gives a break to kids who can’t pay.
Approaches are different but the desired results are
the same: to hone the muscles that help basketball players
leap higher for rebounds and runners explode off the
starting blocks.
EXERCISE TO EXCESS?
Such concentrated workouts dovetail with the Orange
County sports scene that grows increasingly competitive
with parents ever eager to see their young athletes
excel, and hopefully, earn an athletic scholarship,
even be an Olympian or a pro.
Parents and their athletes who want to succeed are under
more pressure to fill a young athlete’s days with
club games and practice, and now, high-intensity training.
“The Greek idea of Pandea, or ‘free play,’
is lost,” said Prietto. “It’s a matter
of excess in what they’re doing. The injury is
related to how much they work.”
Does a child need high-intensity training to
get a scholarship? Clapper emphatically nods yes.
“You can’t get to the next level. Even the
clubs and schools are so competitive. You need an edge
to take it to the next level. Just playing your sport
isn’t going to get you there. There’s other
people competing for the same scholarship who are doing
more.”
That message is hard to miss. Magazines such as “Basketball
Digest” and “Slam” are filled with
advertisements for plyometric shoes and videos to teach
(“Get a 40-inch Vertical!”). Coaches on
soccer and basketball club teams pass out brochures
on high-intensity training. Athletes bring them home
to parents.
Said Rollinson: “They’re all in the business
to make money off the parents who have the financial
wherewithal to spend additional money to train their
sons.”
WORTH THE MONEY
But some of those sons, and daughter, say they are
seeing impressive results. Steve Alaminiana, a junior
free safety at Los Alamitos, said he started reacting
more quickly in the defensive backfield in his first
year working at Fast-Twitch in Brea.
Steve’s father, Steve Sr., who pays more than
$600 for 48 Fast-Twitch sessions on top of his son’s
health club membership, said he hopes the extra training
will get his son a scholarship.
“He got as far as he could with his natural ability,”
said Steve Sr. “He needed a little more technology.”
Others have more modest goals. “I want to get
good at football,” said Russell Scott, a 15 year
freshman at Brea Olinda, “so I can knock the other
guys on their butts.”
A lot of parents can’t pay the price for the workouts.
Others swallow hard and open their wallets. Debbie Cozzolino
spent out about $1500 for six weeks of workouts for
two high school age daughters after they assured her
they were serious about developing their soccer skills,
“ That was a big thing, believe me,” Cozzolino
said. “That was a really big consideration. That’s
a big chunk of money.”
Some parents eschew the special centers and run their
own training programs. Travis Wittick, 13, uses duct
tape on the ground and store-bought equipment to do
his twice weekly plyometric workout in the family back
yard of his parents’ Rancho Santa Margarita home.
“He’s very disciplined,” mother Lynn
Wittick said.
KEEPING IT IN HOUSE
Not all athletes are, Rollinson, like many coaches,
prefers to run a plyo workout within his football program
to control the conditioning and parental expense. Tustin
football coach Myron Miller said his kids can’t
afford a place like IntenseCity. He developed his own
program. But he’s a believer: “If you can
take a 300-pound lineman and get him to jump on a 36-inch
box, he’s going to jump off the line with a lot
more explosiveness.”
Coaches like Mike Ford, the coach of the Los
Alamitos girl’s basketball team, encourage kids
to try Plyo-City or IntenseCity, if their parents
can afford it.
But doctor’s stress it’s easy to overdo
the training, easy to burn out on too much training
too young. Overall, doctors say obesity is a much bigger
problem than overtraining. But parents have to be careful.
Said Prietto: “I have seen some good results
from people who know what they’re doing. The
thing is we do see injuries if the kids don’t
rest.”
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