Training Games on the Track

So if you think about any traditional sport, they involve some sort of object and people come up with challenging games in order to improve skill. These things are necessary for many reasons. They help to break up the monotony of traditional training and keep things fun. This fun aspect is key to internally motivating people to challenge themselves and their own abilities. Many times in these types of games is where athlete's will develop their highest level of abilities.

The other thing it does is create competition and drives the necessity for innovation within their own skills or the willingness to attempt some things they may previously avoid. These games can help to create higher levels of stress and demand for completing a task correctly which, then transfers over to real competition where you judge the situation and the task as familiar and less stressful. Resultantly, all of these things lead to improved performance. So how do we apply this to motocross?

This is not an easy task and needs to meet some of the following criteria. The game needs to:

• Challenge your personal skills
• Create some kind of stress from demand of performance
• Has scoring system for a clear winner
• Needs a set of rules that can be easily adapted to increase the challenge

So here is my idea for a game that can challenge everyone.

You can make riding at the track like video games. Many racing video games that you play you have to hit check points or markers to get new items or increase your score and win, for example; Mario Kart 64.

 This simple concept can be applied to motocross. All you really need is a track, some construction marker flags, stop watch and calculator, or just simply a smart phone. Then you set them up and simply have to hit the flags with your foot as you go by the flags and compare this against your lap time.

Using these simple flags that are cheap and easily distinguishable, you can create a race track where you can accumulate points. Designate specific colors of flags to have certain point values like red is 3, blue is 2 and yellow is 1. This point value then can also dictate the location of where the flag is on the track. The LOWER point value flags can be on a line that is harder to hit. For example, you can put a 1 point flag on the inside line right after a triple. There is obviously many places that you can put these flags on the track depending on the track itself.

Set your flags with the lowest point value in the hardest to hit area and the higher point values in the easier. Then you have to hit that flag with your foot as you go through that line (typically this will be in corners). If we have three colors of flags then if you go through a line and don't touch any flag you automatically get a 4 point score for that section. You ride the entire track and hit as many of the lowest scoring flags that you can.

After you have completed your lap with a clear start and finish line, you times your score by the amount of seconds in your lap. So if I hit the flags and got a score of 12 and my lap time took me 75 seconds, then your score is 12x75 = 900. You then compare your scores and lap times with all those involved to determine the winner. So how does this compare to the set of rules laid out in the beginning?

This game can definitely challenge your personal skills in many ways. It can force you to take lines you wouldn't normally hit, deal with more adverse situations on the track and make you think harder about where you are on the track. It creates a stress to increase performance because you are having to compete against others and striving to accomplish a new challenging task on the track, your score is dictated by lap time and accuracy and precision highly influence your score. The game has a clear scoring system that allows you to determine a winner or loser. Last, it has a clear set of rules that can be easily modified however you want to make the game more challenging.

Now your applying some real sport science to motocross training while having fun. This is the key to developing your skills to a higher level without getting into the mindset that you're training. I hope this idea sparks some interest for all of you and gives you some ideas of new ways to train.

IZOF and Your Optimal Performance

Ideal Zone of Optimal Function (IZOF) is a huge part of any sport. This theory suggests that there is an ideal level of mental arousal and a corresponding effect on performance. This can also be referred to as the Inverted-U Theory. This illustration below will help to make sense of this real fast.

As you can see the left side inverted axis shows the level of performance while the bottom horizontal axis refers to the amount of arousal. As you can see these two factors have an impact upon the other. As emotional arousal starts to increase for a person their performance increases up to a certain level (highlighted red section). As they pass that and become too aroused, they then decrease in performance.

Every person has their own IZOF based on how they deal with certain issues. This past year in my experience with assisting in training of over 30 of the 2013 NFL Combine athlete's, I saw a very real case of someone not knowing their IZOF and how it impacted their performance. This athlete was expected to go in the first round but, couldn't perform during the Combine. The Combine being largely exercised based with the bench press, 40yd dash and multiple others. He performed poorly in some of these areas, yet on the field in a game he was savagely unstoppable.

During his two and a half month combine training he struggled in the weight room and it was a bit of a mystery to everyone. How could someone so savage and obviously strong, struggle so much when lifting weights? Well if you think about it, during a game there is high excitement and lots of emotion. His threshold could have been very high and took a large amount of excitement to get there and perform well. In the weight room it was less mentally arousing and caused his performance to decrease but, in a game he could push a couple hundred pound lineman over like they were playing on a high school JV team. Some people are very dependent on this IZOF and in hindsight I believe it CONTRIBUTED immensely to his Combine performance (no one single factor can usually ever be truly blamed for poor performance and I'm not a Dr of Sport Psychology though do have a Minor in the topic area). So how do you find this?

Finding this and the right way to do it is still an question left unanswered by science however, there are some very practical suggestions. One of the best books on this subject is by Terry Orlick: In Pursuit of Excellence. This book is kind of the poor mans practical handbook for sport psychology. In it is a series of interviews with people who have worked with Orlick at the Olympics and in other professional sports. Also there are sections from these athletes personal journals.

To find this IZOF you need to try multiple things. Each person has their own individual zone that is achieved by different means due to the fact that it is purely individual. Some people need to be more excited like John Henderson and then sum people need to be like a Buddhist monk before competition.

This IZOF state is impacted by everything else that you do. It's not just your mental pre-game, it's how your food, your training and everything else comes together to impact that moment before competition. You hear of many people being superstitious about things in motocross, with their helmet, boots, bike and many more. This is all related to your IZOF and you need to be aware of these tendencies in yourself. Being consistent with them is part of creating your IZOF.

Regardless of what that is for you, you know yourself best and need to find that. The next step is to chart what you have been doing in a journal so that you can find what exactly works best for you. Then you are able to be more consistent over time. This isn't just mindset, it's also your training regime, food, warm-up and everything else.

Now its time for you to find out where your own personal IZOF is in order to replicate your best performance as frequently as possible. You just need to take a very simple scientific approach to this and find out if you need to be more hyped up mentally or more zen before your race.

Readers Question: Confidence and Plateauing

So this is my first answer to a topic request by a reader and it's a good one but, too long to answer everything in one post. The first focus of the question from the reader was on mental strategy and overcoming plateau's. Now after clarifying some of these topics with him the question evolved to this:
Question - "I would say my plateau would be my age now. But in my younger days it was turning from intermediate to pro. It sometimes is hard to have the confidence that you can actually go that fast. Injuries mostly held me back. The mental part was hard to overcome after being injured. I see lots of trainers focusing on the physical side, but not the mental aspect. Which to me it is kind of like golf. Sometimes it is harder to focus than other days. I now am like vet intermediate at 43 I still compete in over 30 from time to time."

Answer: So first off YES age can be a real plateau for many reasons. Typically it's because you've realized that your bones will break and that it all adds up to some giant hospital bills. I think truly in this sport physical abuse from injury and a change in mental state from that abuse, leads to the end of a persons career. A now friend of mine Dwayne De Rosario, a 35 year old professional soccer player who is 6th overall leading goal scorer in MLS history, eludes to a couple more seasons still left in him. The true expected peak of a professional soccer player is in their late 20's and early 30's. Just considering that alone, leads me to feel even more confident of abuse from major injuries and shift in mental focus being the main culprit in stepping down from ones position in the sport. If you don't buy into that, just think of our very own 31 year old legend Chad Reed. He is truly competitive regardless of this past season and he still thinks the risk is worth the reward.

Secondly, a plateau in ability from intermediate to pro is most likely from a lack in change of training stimulus; based on my opinion. I wasn't there for your training and to deal with everything as a whole and resultantly, my answer would be lack of change in training. The best analogy I can come up with for this is something that I think most of us can relate to, hitting a plateau when lifting weights. Most of us have been there and gone through that experience.

So you're lifting weights and your not getting any stronger or making any progress forward. You start asking people about it and you get the following answer most of the time; change your training. So what do you end up doing? Maybe you switch to lighter weight and go for time instead of reps, you increase the overall volume or you drop the reps and start increasing the weight. These are all simple logical explanations for how you break through that physical plateau. Respectfully, you always will hit a slight plateau and then have to adjust. This is why most models of physical performance follow an near staircase effect, like the one below. Specific things to help you break that plateau are all situation specific and depend upon what you are or aren't doing. In terms of motocross specific, it comes down to creating some kind of new training stimulus and that is something I am working on developing. My next post will actually be entirely focused on one major idea for accomplishing this.

Your question about mental strategy I guess really has more to do about overcoming lack of confidence as a result of frequent and devastating injury; I assume. One of the most encompassing models to evaluate this situation is from Brewer (1994), Cognitive Appraisal Model of Psychological Adjustment to Athletic Injury:

This chart is an adapted version applied to dance. We will re-write this with a motocross focus. What happens here is that you crash and you break your leg. Then you have you have both personal and situation factors that impact the future progression of your injury. Personal factors are related to how well you cope with the situation, how this impacts your self identity, how well you take care of yourself previously and individual stress's that you encounter daily. Situation factors can be how well you're supported by others, how quickly your sponsors will forget about you, what kind of treatment is possible for you and other things more outside of your control. These all come together to create an interpretation in your mind, of how this injury will impact you. Then following is the flood of emotions like anger, depression and disbelief. This comes to a final impact on your behavioral response to treatment and rehabilitation. Rather long winded but, it all comes together to impact your performance in the future.

Say you had a negative response to all of this. Now when you come back your always thinking about this. It plagues your mind and slowly eats away at your confidence. Your response to the situation is to not do your rehab exercises all of the time and rebuild everything as a whole. It's not just the injury but, everything as one that develops your confidence. The smartest thing I've ever heard from Tony Alessi was when Mike re-injured his knee at Thunder Valley a few years back. He said you now have to rebuild the entire rider. Your fitness, your nutrition, your discipline, your preparation, your training, how you talk to yourself; everything here impacts your confidence level. If you install an electrical circuit in a house and are missing one little piece, the lights don't turn on. Your performance is the same.

Mental training and strategy is important, especially after injury. Without making this post any longer what I can tell you is this; I do have several posts coming up about these topics specifically. Methods and strategies for improving mental performance encompasses a lot of things that need to be broken apart and hit in depth. These things will come soon, but the best answer for now is to look up Positive Self Talk. Talking to yourself the right way can have a huge impact on your performance.

Train Like You Race

A huge thing in professional sports is the intensity and the quality of training. As I have mentioned before, when your at an elite level the complexity of training jumps way up and things more closely mimic competition. So first what are some of the things you want to mimic in your training on the track? My ideas are these:

• Intensity of a race
• High Stress of a race
• Varying stimulus
• Replicate portions of a race

I wont elaborate on all of these points today, but simply go over some basics. These points will get hit on more in later posts. But for now we'll speak in general terms with at least one major take away.

One of my biggest pet peeves is going to the track and watching some guy who races, riding the same line over and over again on the track. Granted yes you need to develop a fast line because other wise if your slow then you will lose. This hits at the core principle of why most people race, to WIN!! Well if you really want to win then train like you race.

In an Outdoor National for example, you have 40 guys who are all insanely fast, lining up at the gate. 40 guys on a track wide enough to really maybe only line up 3 or 4 wide in the main sections, means things get crowded. Hence when you need to move up fast and have to pass guys but, there is limited space. So how do guys like Dungey, RV, JS7, Reed and other factory guys pass so easily? THEY TAKE DIFFERENT LINES!! Besides the fact that they have faster bikes, they don't ride the same line the whole way. They are comfortable enough to take a new line or pass guys in a way that others aren't used to. So how do you get there?

The big thing you need to do is force yourself to train on different lines. Without question you need to have a fast line and every track naturally has one or two major racing lines. However, you cant always stick in them and need to move forward and avoid playing follow the leader like so many do. The more you force yourself to train hitting different lines, the better you become over all. Think of any other traditional sport. If you were an NFL wide receiver and you ran the exact same line every single play and never changed it, you would get shut down every play and would probably get cut pretty fast. When the coach would ask you to try running a different line and you weren't as good at it most people would then avoid doing what they are not good at.

This is a basic principle in the psychology of human beings. We don't like to admit that we are not good at things. We tend to overly focus on the things that we are good at and avoid those we are not. This simply means that you need to advance your skills on the track in places that you are not as skilled. In a race a lot of things happen and you need to react as fast as possible. If you're the guy that always rides the same line that he's fast in then you cant deal with new situations. However, if you practice taking those slower lines sometimes in order to get faster with them, then you can create some results on the track that may not have otherwise happened. This should be training 101 for most of you truly. But I still see it every day.

Take this to the track with you next time you're training and make yourself a better over all racer. Hit new lines and find ways to become faster in them so that you can force passes to happen in a real race.

12 Things You Didn't Know About Ryan Villopoto's 2013 Supercross Season

(Disclaimer: This information is the result of analysis of all lap times provided by the AMA archives and is not representation of views, opinions or direct information from Ryan Villopoto.)

My goal with this is to show you some things about motocross that you don't normally get. Some motocross websites have their small analytics section that describes the basic results of a race. Here I am trying to show what is possible to accomplish with simple analytics. With this you can then create more effective strategies, know yourself as a racer better, understand your competition and scout riders in a different way if your a team owner. This is just a hint of things to come and I will do this for other big name riders and begin comparing the field of racers against each other.

So without keeping you any longer, here you go..........

Heat Races

1. In Heat races, 75% of his fastest individual laps occur in the first 6 laps
2. In Heat races, his laps with the least difference in time between each lap (the heat races were he was most consistent in his lap times), were 1) St. Louis 2) Anaheim II 3) Oakland 4) Toronto 5) Anaheim I
3. In Heat races, his most consistent string of 2 laps occurs at laps 6 and 7
4. In Heat races, his overall lower average lap times occurred during lap 6

Main Events

1. In Main events, 75% of his fastest individual laps occurred in the first 6 laps
2. In Main events, 87.5% of his fastest individual laps occurred in the first 9 laps
3. In Main events, his laps with the least difference in time between each lap (the main events where he was most consistent in his lap times), were 1) Salt Lake 2) Atlanta 3) Arlington 4) Indianapolis 5) Minneapolis
4. In Main events, his overall lowest average lap times occurred on lap 6
5. In Main events, his most consistent average 5 laps occurs between 7 and 11

Practices

1. In practice he averages overall 9 laps per timed practice
2. In practice roughly 55% of his fastest practice times occur during the 7th lap or later
3. In practice he gets his fastest lap most frequently on lap 8 

Coaching in Motocross Part 2 – The Practical Science

The first post was a general statement that there is a problem in coaching in motocross and also some specific problems. These are things that perpetuate throughout the sport and have a tendency to hold our sport back. Advancement’s in science, understanding of a sport and increased competitiveness all drive the growth of a sport. The more we know about our great sport and how to more effectively train others in the sport, the further we move motocross into the main stream and out of its near limbo state. As large as it has become, it still hangs in the balance of the economy and the deep pockets of mom and dad. Sports like the NFL, MLB, NHL and MLS all continue on with increased or sustained popularity and revenue due to the increased competitive nature of the sport and the new level of interaction with the sport through technology.

Therefore our sport needs to continue to grow and I believe that it truly starts here with us as professionals of the sport and with you who are reading this in hopes of taking the sport to the next level. A major step in that evolution is our ability to coach in the sport.

As I said before there are these things called cognitive biases that vastly impact our coaching. If you take the time to read that Wikipedia list and the definitions, it should be an instant ah ha moment for you. This is just part of the things that need to be understood in coaching. Schools like University of Akron and East Tennessee State University have entire departments dedicated to PhD. studies in the areas of coaching and coaching science. There truly is that much to learn about . This ranges from the types of cueing to correct or teach an exercise, how you reinforce the persons behaviors and how well you understand the progression of that person based on their current age and level of abilities. Truly there is more than this, but I feel these are the three most fundamental pieces to focus on that will have immediate impact.

Cues

There are many different types of cues and they can be used in numerous ways to correct a particular part of the sport.  Some these cues can be visual, audible and physical/tactile cues, to start the list off. Visual cues can take place in ways like; your pit board, hand signals, color coding, visual demonstration of a task and showing a video. Audible cues are just that, things that can be heard. You can give a certain meaning to a word that reinforces some particular behavior or any numerous things. A great example is when having someone do plyometric jumps over hurdles. Your goal is to get them to create full extension with the body and sometimes I will tell them to imagine they are jumping to see over a fence. While this crosses many other boundaries in reinforcement etc… it does give you a simple example of how an audible cue can be used to create an action. Physical/tactile cues are a bit more challenging for coaching in motocross but can be done. This will typically be done when a rider is not on the track and requires some physical manipulation of the body. I help teach athletes to keep their foot firmly planted on the ground by tapping on the top of their foot while they are doing a stationary movement. I create this physical cue that causes a response in the brain to instantly react and send the message to the foot to accomplish my intended goal.

Reinforcement

This becomes very complex and is the real bread and butter of coaching. There are an established 13 principles of reinforcement. This could be an entire post and so I will highlight successive approximations, intermittent reinforcement principle and negative reinforcement principle. Successive approximation principle states that you teach someone to act in a certain way that they haven’t before by, rewarding successive steps that are pertinent to accomplishing the task. Intermittent reinforcement principle states that in order to get someone to continue to increase performance in a task you must slowly and intermittently reduce the frequency of rewards for proper accomplishment of the task. Last, the negative reinforcement principle states that you stop a mildly incorrect behavior immediately by having them complete the task correctly. As much as this may be a shock to many of you, NO YOU DO NOT GET SOMEONE TO STOP DOING AN INCORRECT BEHAVIOR BY GETTING MAD OR UPSET WITH THEM! If you’re talking about Ryan Villopoto not getting his elbow up in the corner or something that is a different story. But most of you won’t be teaching the top pro in the world, you will be establishing proper habits in a youth rider.

Progression

This topic is more complex because science has not studied motocross specifically for an established motor pattern progression through youth development stages. However, we can gain some clues from the general science of development of throwing. According to research from Langendorfer (1980,1982) there are 5 clear stages of throwing. The first is standing relatively still with little to no feet or trunk movement. Second is with rotation of the body, maybe a step forward and the arm crosses the body. Third stage is where they step the same leg forward as the throwing arm, little to no movement from hips during initial throw and some hip flexion and rotation during follow through. Fourth stage the child steps opposite foot forward with minimal hip and spine rotation and throws with follow through to wide base stance. Last is the final throwing pattern of a ball that you expect when someone knows how to throw a baseball properly, like a pitcher.

That was all just to describe the stages of development in throwing a ball that many of us have seen children go through. The point of this is to ask yourself, do you really think that you can just put a kid on a bike and expect him to get it all right? I didn’t even touch on the idea that you are suppose to roll a ball to kids first before you teach them to catch and throw progressively. This should open your mind to the fact that you need to pay close attention to where your rider is in their stages of development, especially if you are picking up someone who trained with another person who had no clue. They may need to regress in the complexity of their training before they can move forward.

All of these things listed above come together to create a more complete coach and training experience. You have to cue the person through different means to get their brain to understand how to execute the action. Once they do this correct you must reinforce that habit properly. Finally you must advance your rider along clear stages of progression in their riding. This will allow you to be the most effective coach possible. 

Coaching in Motocross Part 1 – The Problem

(This blog posting is intended only to bring to light the issues of coaching in motocross and to be a stepping stone for all coaches to help further their abilities and understanding as a coach. At no point is this intended to be malicious to those in the industry and is written with the understanding that those who are coaching in motocross do so with their best foot forward and to truly help others. My goal is simply to shed light on the scientific aspects of coaching that I feel haven’t been developed in our great sport because of the unique nature of motocross. Also there are many more aspects of this that could be elaborated on and will but, at a later point in time.)

The reality is that coaching in motocross is fairly primitive. By all other comparisons of coaching with more traditional sports, we could say that coaching as a whole in motocross is still somewhere back in the stone age. They tend to lack formal direction, only understand how to train the very basics and don’t understand how to progress the athlete after they have reached a certain level of abilities. In my opinion and my opinion only; the majority of effective coaching for motocross racers ends around the intermediate class. From the outside it looks like once they reach this level of proficiency as a racer, progress comes to a slowing halt and any movement forward in their abilities is a result of their own utilization of the Malcolm Gladwell concept of 10,000 hours of practice to become expertly skilled at a task. Overall rather slow progress that can be as unpredictable as throwing darts blindfolded.

If you’re a high school football player and get recruited to college a whole new world of training opens up. Some schools now have more advanced technology than some NFL teams thanks to research grants and sport science divisions that house a couple hundred students for the teams use however, the majority of them are a step below still. Returning to the point, in college that football player now gets exposed to more frequent training, more effective training and in turn you see many of these athlete’s grow through their senior year. Then they make it onto the pro’s and now they have world leading experts driving practice every day, monitoring their state of physical readiness, sport psychologists to help them overcome problems, nutritionists, every technology available and an entire team of analysts to support the decision of each thing done in training and game. This jump in quality of training and level of advancement is something not seen in our sport.

The majority of the coaches in our sport are former racers who may or may not have been successful and believe that their experience can help other young kids get better. While I support the notion that you could help others succeed by following this traditional method in motocross, most of these guys don’t realize that their ideas are tainted by the very thing they plan to use to help others, their experience. Every human being has a set of what are called cognitive biases. In fact Wikipedia’s site on cognitive biases lists what must be near 100 different types (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases). These are our thoughts and views of everything in life, shaped by our own experiences. To accompany this is one of my most hated sayings, “What someone else perceives is reality”. We've all heard this before from our parents, our boss and others. The truth is that your perception is typically misguided by your cognitive biases and what you many times believe to be right or the truth is only a small sliver of it or not even close to reality. What someone else perceives is not in fact reality many times. People in Salem Massachusetts used to believe that there were witches living among them that were vessels of the devil. They burnt those people at the stake because they perceived this to be true when in reality it wasn't. A grim and extreme example but, think about that when you’re coaching and what that means for yourself as a coach.

Frequently these things make you a less effective coach. Many times you will see the rider do something wrong in practice or during a race and you will give them feedback that doesn't accomplish anything. It lacks true analysis of the underpinning issue and a real way to solve it. The solution is usually, do this or that without clear instruction in the HOW department. Following this it is unknown by many how to get the brain to grasp and apply this concept, resulting in improper execution and a reoccurring vicious cycle of frustration. You tend to try and change something the rider is doing that previously was actually effective for them and their riding style. Frequently a coach will get to a point where he and the rider feel like they are going in circles around the same two or three things without a solution.  The true art and understanding of coaching is missing in many of these situations

To be continued……

Future of this blog

The future of this blog is to do some things for the sport of motocross that haven't been explored before or at least public knowledge that I am aware of. I will explore some new ideas of sport science and their application in motocross. These are some of the topic areas this blog will focus on

• Strength and Conditioning
• Data Analytics
• Creating a training load for racing
• New technology applications in the sport
• Sport Psychology
• Motocross coaching
• On the track training techniques
• Youth Development
• Physiological monitoring

Hopefully from these topics some new light will be shed on the sport and will allow you and others in the community to take this sport further than ever before.

Theory of Athletic Ability in Motocross

The reality is that most motocross racers are to some degree physically fit, but overall un-athletic and people mistakenly associate being fit with being a good athlete. These two do not inherently go together.  It also goes vice versa, you could be amazingly naturally skilled but have horrible fitness. This side though is more easily recognized by individuals. But with sports like motocross it is harder to discern a clear boundary for where the line in the sand is drawn. If you had the fitness of a sit at your desk accountant who worked out twice a week to make themselves feel better but you had the riding skill that Villopoto does, you could accomplish a lot in the sport.  However take someone like Ryan Villopoto off of the bike and put him in a soccer game, basketball game or any other number of sports and it may become more apparent how lacking he could be in certain physical aspects. Why does this happen?

The reality is that parents over specialize in motocross with their kids at such a young age that a vast majority of other movement patterns are not fully developed. These motor patterns are the important ground work for developing the greatest possible athletic potential. Think of them like a computer program; in order for a robot to execute an action like building a car you have to write a computer program. The advantage that programmer has is that he can simply manipulate the code a few times and it all comes together. Human beings have to go through hundreds of repeated trials and then additionally be taught by someone who knows the proper motor patterns.

Many people may argue that you need to get your kids to specialize early now in order to get good enough. On the contrary, research has found opposite. At the Seattle Sounders Sport Science seminar in 2012 an esteemed member of the Ajax Amsterdam youth development academy (the most prestigious youth soccer academy in the world) presented on this topic. Jan Willem Teuniessen is a PhD. candidate and the sport physiology director of their program. Based upon research and their experience they have found that developing their youth’s ability in multiple sports, makes them better overall athletes and better soccer players long run. As Jan said in his presentation, the former idea of early specialization like previously done in Europe, is wrong and the old American model of multiple sport athlete’s is correct. However, in America we’re pushing towards the old European model while they’re over the water saying NO….GO BACK!!!!

Most kids in motocross don’t do other sports and are fairly limited in their other activities outside of motocross. They have fun like any other kid but some of the same movement patterns that would be developed in a kid who played four or five sports when he was young, are not present in many of the kids who only ride. Granted they may be good racers, but it comes without question that these kids could be better. It is impossible to very hard to argue that kids who are very athletic (have good movement patterns and are active and fit) don't have greater potential on the bike than those who just ride. Their body can more efficiently deal with the stresses of riding and additionally, the movement patterns and skills they may learn from other sports and activities may grant them a greater length of capabilities. This can include the ability to withstand SOME injuries and also have a reaction that occurs without thinking for more unknown circumstances that may occur while riding. The more skilled they are at moving period, the more things become effortless and they gain the ability to divert attention to more focused skills that the sport requires.

The plain and simple lesson here is to make sure that your kids are as active as possible in other sporting activities other than just motocross. I understand the time and financial demands of the sport, regardless the best chance you give your kid is to develop the best well rounded athlete that they can be.