 Motocross Racer: Carter Gray Photo: Zachary C. Bako Joel YounkinsHigh Performance Coach Today's motocross and off-road racing landscape is as competitive as its ever been. Like for the big bike riders, being a fast rider to get the job done on the weekends is long gone. Everyone is fast, and it takes someone with the complete package to rise to the top at a national level race. With racing being a highly dominant family sport, parents/guardians are doing a great job with being invested with their kids success. The effort is clearly all there, but sometimes the direction and patience isn't always in the best interests of their riders, even if intentions are meaningful. In this blog, I'm going to cover physical preparation for mini racers, when to start, what they should do, and playing the long game with their racing careers.
We live in a society that if a little is good, more must be better right? That reality is very true in the racing world too. If training is good, we should start sooner to get a head start, if lifting weights will make you strong, we should have you lift more. If running gives your endurance, we should run more. In training, development, and performance, timing and dosing is everything. When to Start Physical Preparation When the time comes to start off of the bike training or to work with someone like myself, parents often times want to jump the gun early especially if you have a "get ahead of the competition mindset" thought process. If you know that everyone will be training in the gym in a few years, we might as well just get a head start right? In terms of physical development and preparation go, this almost never holds true in my world. Rushing into training for a racer is ready will yield a couple different outcomes. 1.) They will make very little progress if any at all. 2.) They will be excited at first but will get bored with it after a couple weeks. 3.) It will only fast track the racer to early burnout. To be clear, when I'm referring to a physical preparation program, I'm referring to a structure plan that is designed to yield specific training adaptations. A regime to closely follow, a schedule, pushing yourself and being willing to get uncomfortable to make progress. Activities like martial arts, gymnastics, stick and ball sports, BMX, and general outside play will yield maximal long term results for young racers, specifically in the 4-11/12 year old (50-65cc riders) group. If desired in this time period, you can start to incorporate some physical preparation, but it shouldn't be an aggressive planned routine. You can perform basic body weight exercises like planks, body weight squats, push ups, etc to build some general levels of fitness and provide an environment/culture of "this is what it takes" and what's to come for a young future rider. Learning a pre-riding/pre-race warm up early on would also be a high priority to teach importance and normalize this element of physical preparation when they're young. But it should be a very passive and low priority variable in a young racers program. I have a 50-65cc Moto Workout Plan that is completely free, if you'd like a copy for your young racer, reach out to me through my email, [email protected]. This was the same workout program Carter Gray was on from the time he was on a 50 all the way up until the Charlotte SMX 65cc All-Star race, before he moved up to 85's and began his full-time training program with me. The perfect age to begin a structured physical preparation plan depends on physical, mental, and emotional maturity. This is hopefully around the 12-13 age range for riders, when they're on 85's or Supermini's. At this point they should not only begin to make physical puberty changes to the body, but they now have the emotional maturity to follow a structured physical training program. These aren't exactly hard and fast rules, but I do highly recommend beginning a training program at least one year before moving to big bikes full time. If you're waiting until the racer gets on a big bike to begin physical preparation, especially by the time they're on a 250, at this point, we can now say you're late to the party. It takes a good year for an athlete to really "learn to train" so by the time you start, you won't really see huge dividends until a year later. If the program is good, you'll see progress right away, but it really does takes a solid year of committed hard training to really click into another gear. At this point, you can really begin to get after it and push your potential vs that first year of developing the body into a higher level of fitness. Signs that your 85cc-Supermini rider is ready to begin a structured physical preparation program.
What Should Mini Racers Do? Early on in their training, mini racers need to focus on high quality, low intensity work. Meaning lifting lighter weights/resistance and more reps and exercise variations to build general fitness. Because of their youth and lack of physical development, they will need to build from the ground floor first before adding high intensity to the equation. Things like learning proper form and technique, confidence, understanding their way around a gym, and consistency to show up with the right attitude are the things that will set them up for a great future. By adding too much intensity too soon, with things like heavy barbell work and high intensity conditioning methods, they first and foremost won't get the true benefits from those exercises because they're not prepared for those things yet. It's like telling a beginner to go hit the biggest jumps on the track the first day. They're ill prepared for it and will do nothing to speed up their overall progress without learning technique, turns, breaking, etc. And now back to a physiological side of things, their heart, bones, muscles, and tendon all need to be properly developed before you can add a high degree of strain to their young bodies. By performing low intensity exercises and low intensity conditioning, it will allow their body to adapt by making long term adaptions that will help change the course of their physical fitness for the rest of their careers. It may look boring by having them get really good at goblet squats and push ups, or it may look like they're not trying hard enough by performing conditioning with lower heart rate ranges. However, this style of training will build long lasting results and it will build that foundation so that when they're 15-18 years old, they can start to drop the hammer and train very similar to how the pro's train. When you play the long game, in the end, you actually are way ahead of the curve because you've taken the appropriate steps. Keys to Remember
The Long Game As parents and coaches managing and directing these young racers careers, it's so important that the baseline of their success is to be having fun and actually enjoy what they're doing. They're not adults working full time jobs yet, their brains cannot handle and compute that responsibility. I've worked with A LOT of junior high level aged athletes and mini racers a like. What makes it fun for them, is to see and feel improvement. They want to have direction, to be coached, and to be able to smile and enjoy their training. The faster you try to move a young athlete out of this phase of sport, the faster you run the risk of wrecking their entire career with burnout, and hitting their ceiling of potential way too soon. Patience is a virtue they say, and from my years of coaching, it gets put on full display everyday in front of my eyes. The best thing as parent or guardian, is to take a step back before you ever push forward. Be willing to open doors for them, inspire them, believe in them, lead by example, and to be their biggest fan. Moto parents are crushing it, they're all in. I'm not sure there's another sport out there that outshines the effort moto parents take. But with that effort, remember they are just little people that need to go on a journey themselves. These mini racers, it's a weird time for them. They're trying to fit in with their peers, they're going through puberty and trying to compute with hormonal changes, they are trying to answer tough questions about what they want to do with their future selves, who they want to be, all of this as the world closes in on them as adults expect them to win every race. In long term development, it's a long game, its ebbs and flows, and it's about gradually slow development and progression, all the while of simply just letting the kids come into their own. They are the captain of their own ship, as the adults in their corner, we're just the co-pilots helping them steer it to where they want to take it.
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