Don’t Make Girls Hate Exercise

07 Aug Don’t Make Girls Hate Exercise

This post was originally published by Erica Suter on the Girls Soccer Network blog.

Don’t make girls hate exercise.

This is your #1 job as a coach and/or parent to young girls.

When it comes to instilling healthy habits for a lifetime, your job is to make exercise, training, and movement FUN during childhood.

When I was 8 years old, I exercised for the sake of joy. There was exploration, creativity, playfulness, and yes, still competition within the fun. I wrestled with my brother, played flag football with friends, threw baseballs over trees, raced against my dad, jumped on trampolines, jumped rope, and did cartwheels in the front yard.

Early on, exercise was fun. It set me up for my older years of LOVING it.

Isn’t that the point to sports?

Your kids should want to be active, to train, to compete and get better. Don’t let their childhood go to waste with 5 different private trainers that run them through predictable drills, making them run miles on end, or signing them up for speed sessions that a pro athlete is doing.

Girls have their ENTIRE sports careers to get serious about training, and when it starts with the priority of fun, they are more likely to build that passion for training hard when they’re older.

The fastest way to make a girl have a bad taste in her mouth about training when she is older is to push her into serious training way too young.

With that said, I’m so grateful my mom and dad never forced me to train seriously young. All they did was give me opportunities to explore, dabble in many activities and sports, and discover my passion on my own. Thankfully, I picked the correct sport, and that was soccer.

I was good at lacrosse and track sprinting, but soccer took me way further in the end.

If one sport is pushed too young, when girls are older, parents realize perhaps it was the wrong sport, and who knows, the girl could’ve been a D1 softball player instead.

But how would she have known? She never dabbled.

Try Multiple Sports

All sports were critical for me to try to find my strong suits. They enhanced my soccer skills by teaching me agility, spatial awareness, and building other muscle groups to avoid overuse. Other sports gave me a break from soccer, to miss it, and not burn out.

When I finished my growth spurt and became a teenager, I was so passionate about training and soccer only, I wanted to do MORE. It was time to get serious and do more specialized work.

My athletic career took a beautiful, organic trajectory: enjoy exercise and moving a lot young —> enjoy all sports for fun young —> make the decision MYSELF to become serious about one sport later —> still LOVE training more than ever now that I’m in my 30s.

Make Sure Exercise is Fun

I still want to bang my head against a wall when I see under 12-year-olds doing box jumps, resisted sprints, and drills older, matured athletes should be doing.

A lot of trainers succumb to the parent’s dictatorship. They make the sessions look advanced so the parent can make an Instagram post with a caption talking about the grind.

“My kid on their grind!”

It’s gross.

What’s worse is, I see the kid going at sub max speed through ladder drills, which isn’t even a grind at all. It’s not hard. They’re not getting faster. They’re only making their foot sore.

What actually is a grind is, doing high quality work, prioritizing recovery, and ensuring it’s fun so they keep going back.

That’s the true grind.

Not a quick Instagram post that gives off the illusion of “hard work.”

A Word for Trainers Who Nonsense with Young Ones

Trainers, first and foremost, need to stay in their integrity and deliver what kids need, not what parents want.

I get the urge to make money and keep clients happy, but I’d rather risk losing thousands of dollars than caving on my long-term development pathway coaching philosophy, and doing training that doesn’t align with an athlete’s age and maturation.

And true story: I lost thousands when I told parents I wouldn’t run their 11-year-olds in the ground, and we were going to work on speed with fun games, races, and tag. I know the mental and physical consequences of making training too intense and advanced too young, so I was fine with losing a handful of clients that Summer.

As a coach, my top priority for young ones is to ensure they LOVE training. My other priority is to ensure they get exposed to a variety of movement, environments, and games that build all muscles groups for long, healthy sports careers.

I can’t repeat enough that kids are not elite pros.

Every coach should want young ones to have fun. Why the two mile runs at practice? Why?

And every parent should want the same for their child.

There’s a toxic rush in society now to grow girls up way too fast.

For what?

Seriously ask that question. And ask yourselves if you want them to develop a bitter taste in their mouths toward exercise because you pushed serious training on them too young.

Because if they do, they’ll turn into the woman one day who struggles to lose weight, stay healthy, and make time for training out of joy when she’s older.

She will become sedentary.

She will be so burned out from working out, she loses herself.

She will hate exercise so much she will never be motivated to do it when she’s older.

Don’t make girls hate exercise.

Learn more and get my book FEMALE ATHLETE HIGH PERFORMANCE HERE