A decreased ability to concentrate, confused thoughts, motivation low, increased irritability, grumbling, quarrelsome, overly sensitive to criticism, anxious or depressed. This may sound like a typical teenager but they are also signs a coach watches for in athletes.
Good coaches recognise the signs of over-training and adjust their athletes’ schedule so the next phase of over-training, burn-out, doesn’t occur. A great coach will not let these signs develop because they know how to pace the training sessions without over-stressing the athlete.
What has fitness training to do with students? Burn-out may occur in any person in any profession at any age. Many parents don’t realise how much pressure they place on their children when they load up their awake time with sports training and competition outside of school hours. Some students are playing two sports a season. Some parents don’t realise they may be setting their child up for burn-out later that school year because they haven’t planned sufficient recovery time for their student.
If you are a parent who encourages outside sports for their children, then you should consider these three things:
- Training and playing sport is tiring, very tiring.
- A tired student will find it difficult to concentrate in class.
- In today’s world, a person has a much better chance of achieving a high income with good grades than becoming a highly-paid athlete.
An over-committed student who finds it difficult to concentrate in class will eventually fall behind on their grades. They may require the help of a coach, an academic coach.
We have many athletic students attend our tuition room because of the reasons mentioned above. When they do attend, we ask parents to consider dropping one activity before introducing a program of tuition. There is no sense in adding to an already over-loaded timetable. Nothing will be achieved. The tuition, depending upon the grade the student is in, will probably take one full year to bring them aligned with the class. That is only one season of any one sport, so they will not miss much when dropping one activity to replace it with tuition.
As an academic coach (with a long background in fitness training) I watch for signs of over-training in our students and act on it. Sometimes that action will be to remove tuition from the student’s time-table if nothing else is removed. We do this for the well-being of the student.
But you don’t have to be a sporting student to fall behind. Sometimes a high achieving student places themselves under unnecessary pressure because they have not learned to budget time or to study correctly. A student like this will benefit from some one on one guidance so they may learn from an expert how to research and produce assignments, or how to prepare for secondary school exams.
So, as the school year progresses, watch for signs that indicate your student may not be keeping up and is silently crying for help.
How important is it to be a reader in this world of instant information? Does sitting with your child and playing computer games produce the same outcome as sitting with them and reading a book? Does it matter that you have never sat with your child and read to them before they have attended school?
Well, if your child was an average student last year chances are they will be an average student this year. If they struggled with maths last year they will probably be struggling with maths this year. Nothing changes unless something changes. What has to change to improve your child’s grades?
And on the other side of the coin insufficient sleep will make children hyperactive, lacking in confidence, irritable, inattentive and fall behind in class and if this sounds like your youngster then it is so easy to rectify.
People are social animals, meaning we need to mix with others, and children are no different, but what is going on when a child who was excited about attending school is suddenly resisting?
It was a beautiful day on the beach for Samantha because she loved all the people and dogs surrounding her. She loved laughter and barking. She heard some people singing “Happy Birthday” and then she had a great idea. She bought ice-cream for everyone because it was her birthday too. Soon everyone was singing “Happy Birthday” to Samantha as they licked their ice-creams.
A baboon woke up in his gold-covered bed and thought to himself, “I think I will become a nurse.” Gregory went to the internet, searched 
The policewoman felt her way into the dark room, smelt dead fish and saw ropes hanging from the walls. The light was so dim that she heard the child’s soft sobs before she saw the tiny, petrified girl tied to the rusty pole in the corner. The door slammed, heavy work-boots scraped and the harf-harf harf-harf of an asthmatic wheeze lifted the soft hairs on the back of her neck like zombies rising in a graveyard. Her trembling hands reached for the taser in the side pocket of her belt, she turned and shot the barbs and the dark shape froze, jerked and collapsed onto the concrete. The policewoman rushed to the child, wrapped her arms around her and whispered, You’re safe now.”
A long time ago in an old house, there was a brown teddy bear with a special secret. Every morning, before breakfast, the fluffy little guy would put on his black cloak. He would get in his toy car and drive right down the narrow street and visit his friend Bob, the polar bear teddy. They would play in Bob’s huge garden until the sun fell. Teddy would drive in his little red car back down from his secret friend’s house until he was back in the old house.
When the pigs were in their sty playing in the mud they found a cassowary feather and one pig ate it and suddenly forty-nine more feathers fell on them and forty-nine pigs ate one each and all turned into humans.
XtraMile Tuition Strategies (North Brisbane) - 0415 049461 