Should my child specialise in one sport? Here's my honest answer as a speed coach: the specialising that holds most young athletes back isn't the sport they pick. It's the way they train. Splitting the body into small parts, and going ultra sport-specific before there's anything to be specific with. Fix those two and your child is on the right road, whatever sport they love.
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I see both mistakes every single week, with genuinely talented players. So let me walk you through them.
Mistake one: training the body in boxes
I call it singular specialising. Here's how it works. Take the body apart. Find the weak link. Train that one piece on its own.
Your ankle isn't stiff or reactive enough? Ankle day. Then the knee gets its own block. Then the hips. Then a core circuit, a mobility circuit and a reactive circuit. Every box gets its own tick, its own special day.
It sounds a lot like a bodybuilding split. Chest day, back day, leg day. That makes sense for bodybuilders, because they're judged on isolated muscles on a stage. Sport isn't judged that way. Nobody gives your son points for how good his ankle looks. He wins or loses on where he finishes.
And after a season of boxes? His top speed and his acceleration are exactly where they were last season. He's got an ankle that's great at ankle exercises and a knee that's stable on a balance beam. Then the ball goes over the top, he needs to hit 34 km/h to get there, and his body has never been pushed to that level. Not once.
Six months in, you're still getting caught by the same player who caught you last year.
Mistake two: sport-specific before there's a foundation
This is the one that catches the good players more than the bad ones.
Small-sided games. Reaction drills with a ball. Footwork patterns. Ten thousand reps of technical work. All of it is done at the speed your child already has.
Think about it this way. You can teach a six-year-old to shoot tens of thousands of times. They will never have the accuracy, the power and the stability of an adult who has trained their engine and produces far more force. Right?
So work on technique as much as you want. But if the systems for high-level speed and power aren't built, you'll be limiting your child their whole career. I say it day in, day out:
Specific work carries a foundation over. It can't create one. The transfer only runs one way.
Build the foundation first. Then go to the sport-specific work, and now it actually is specific, because your child is carrying all that force and athleticism into it.
Should my child specialise in one sport or one engine?
Here's the idea that replaces both mistakes. I call it the transfer effect.
You train a few things that sit at the very top: the hardest, the fastest, the most forceful. Things that use many parts of the body at once. And everything underneath comes along with them.
Take a flat-out sprint. It needs acceleration. It needs top speed. The ankle has to stay stiff on every contact. The knee has to hold. The hips have to extend. Nobody isolated anything, and every one of those parts got trained.
Think about how you learned to drive. Nobody sat you in a car and said, "This week we're only doing the clutch. Next week, mirrors. In six months we'll put it all together." You'd never drive. You drove the car, badly at first, and your feet, eyes and hands all got better together because the whole task demanded it. Your child's body learns speed the same way.
I think of speed as a car. The ankle, the knee, acceleration, change of direction: that's the paint, the seats, the mirrors. Polish one part and the car is no faster. Build the engine and every part moves with it.
The engine: what we actually train
The rule is simple. I call it being led by the max. If you can put a lot of force into the ground in a very short time, everything that takes longer rises with it.
So the engine is three things. I never build a program without all of them.
- ✓Squatting. Pushing the whole body against a heavy load, all the way down and all the way up. It builds strength, muscle and the stiffness through the knee and ankle that everyone chases with ankle drills off YouTube.
- ✓Max speed exposure. Strength only carries over if you practise using it at speed. The nervous system decides how fast you're allowed to move, and it adapts to what you give it. Never flat out means it's never asked to go faster.
- ✓Maximal plyometrics. Jumps and bounds, one leg at a time, horizontal and vertical. Land, absorb, push, with no time to think. That's how nearly every field sport is played.
One honest note: if your child is rehabbing an injured joint, isolating it has its place. That's rehab, not performance.
How to check your child's week
You don't need to add anything. Do this instead. Write down everything your child does in a week, club training included, and ask three questions of each item:
- ✓Is it engine work? Does it push something to its max and pull everything else up with it?
- ✓Does it happen at speed? If it never gets close to game speed, the body has no reason to carry it into the game.
- ✓Does it move the numbers? If something has been in the program for months and nothing has moved, it's decoration. I'd cut it tomorrow.
Then count how many times in that week your child went truly flat out, and how many times a truly heavy load went through their legs. For a lot of the weeks I see on paper, the answers are "once, in the game, if they're lucky" and "zero". See the problem?
Fewer things, much harder, and measured. That's the whole approach. And measuring matters most of all, because if you're not measuring, how do you know your child is progressing? It's the same reason speed isn't just genetic: it moves when you train the right things in the right order.
If you want to know which part of your child's engine is holding the rest back, that's exactly what our assessment finds.