Brett Klika promotes adding movement-based exercises in practice that resemble free play for young players. The exercises might look a little unconventional and unrelated in the short term but could help produce better lacrosse players in the long term by helping their brains trigger more complete athletic development.

The 2013 IDEA Personal Trainer of the Year and CEO of SPIDERfit Kids, Klika has grown increasingly concerned by changes he has seen over his 20-plus year career in children’s athletic development. He points to a combination of proliferation of technology, decrease in free play, reduction in physical education in schools and increase in earlier sports specialization as leading to athletes having fewer basic skills.

“I’d ask them to skip to warm up, and they couldn’t skip,” Klika said. “Or we’d do conditioning and they couldn’t jump rope.”

Research from occupational therapists determined that children could not perform certain skills because their brain had never been taught them. Athletes essentially were cutting away at their athletic foundation, which affected their abilities when they reached higher levels.

“Kids need to move because that’s how your brain grows,” Klika said.

Klika is encouraging coaches to integrate free play, circuits that utilize varied movements and basic skill development into their practice plans. Klika authored “60 Ways to Play,” a guide that US Lacrosse is using to bolster physical literacy in children. The earlier such activities can be introduced in an athlete’s life, the better.

“We’re essentially facilitating play, but it’s play with a purpose,” Klika said. “We call it ‘powerful play.’ We say, ‘We’ll play this game for a warm-up,’ and the kids are going crazy, but we see a game that is developing visual awareness, body awareness, all these different things. Our whole program has blossomed from that notion that if we integrate games and play even into even high level youth athletics, it’s tremendously beneficial for their ability to not only continue to play for life but to see an increase in performance over their course of development.”

Klika notes that coaches still must teach the usual lacrosse skills, but they can help players further by substituting into their warm-up routine a non-sports specific game and take an approach that fosters more dynamic movements, such as shuffling or skipping with variations.

“When your neuromuscular system has been exposed to all these different things, when you’re thrown into a sport like lacrosse, you’re constantly solving movement problems the entire time,” Klika said. “You’re constantly solving these situational problems. If I train and have all these different capacities, that’s when truly elite performance shows up. The more diverse the circuitry your brain has, the more tools you have afforded to you as you progress in a sport.”

It doesn’t have to be major overhaul of practice, just a deliberate approach to include activities that could help children develop more completely.

“You’re probably still designating 5-10 minutes of warm-up and 5-10 minutes for some sort of conditioning,” Klika said. “You’re not adding practice time or taking away from tactical work, you’re just doing something a little more strategic.