Junior Development.
Developing athletes from a young age is a big part of our ethos at GAC. We believe that fundamental movement skills of physical literacy and athleticism are rarely taught at schools or by sports coaches.
Therefore, coming into a supervised gym environment to develop the movement skills that underpin all sporting movements is a crucial step in the long term development of a junior athlete.
Our Junior Development program is designed for high school aged athletes (12-17 years of age), as we believe this is the best window to positively impact talented youth athletes and help them on their path to success. Many young athletes play a lot of organised sport, so our program is designed to complement this training load as well as support these young athletes through the rigours of playing sport during a time of growth and maturation.
Program Includes.
Needs Analysis Questionnaire.
This questionnaire will be sent to you once you purchase the junior development program and will take up to 10-minutes to complete. It is a detailed questionnaire designed to help our expert coaches understand your needs and goals, training experience, injury history, training schedule and any other relevant information we may need to help us create your program.
Physical Performance Assessment.
This assessment guides your programming, helping the coach to ascertain any areas of weakness that you may need to develop. The testing session involves a range of tests and presents a snapshot of your overall athletic capability. Every test will be targeted to you and your relevant sport, however the majority of athletes will be tested on the following:
Quality of movement
Joint range of motion
Maximum & reactive strength (explosiveness)
Lower and upper body power
Running Technique
Individualised Program.
Once you have completed your testing session and questionnaire your coach will spend a considerable amount of time constructing your individualised program. Your program will be completely unique to you and your needs, goals and sport. We believe that the best results can be achieved in the most efficient time frame when the program is tailored to each unique athlete. Too many athletes choose cookie-cutter programs that have been generalised to their sport and we believe this will not reap the best results for athletes looking to perform their absolute best.
The junior development program includes up to 2 strength and conditioning sessions per week. You will complete your gym program in small group sessions and will have access to the gym during gym hours for extra conditioning work if it is programmed.
Your program will be accessed through our online programming software TeamBuildr, which you can access through the TeamBuildr application on your phone or tablet.
Orientation Sessions.
The orientation sessions are when one of our expert coaches will take you through your program to ensure you are performing each exercise correctly and understand the purpose and progression of each exercise. These sessions will be at the beginning of each new program block (roughly every 10-12 weeks).
Small Group Sessions.
The linchpin to the Geelong Athlete Centre is the small group sessions. These sessions are capped at 8 athletes per coach and are similar to supervised gym sessions, where you will be completing your own gym program with coach supervision. These sessions typically run M-F 6-11:30am & 3:30-7:15pm and on Saturdays 8-10:15am.
We believe that strength coaching is crucial to an athlete’s success, however not everyone can afford one-on-one coaching, so these small groups make high quality performance training more affordable. There is also the bonus of training amongst other athletes, which aids in creating an inspiring and motivating culture.
