The "Athletes First" Rule

Q: What's wrong with Junior Golf Instruction today?

A: One dimensional focus on the golf swing.

Sport specific skills like a free throw, a penalty kick, a touchdown pass....a golf swing....all of these are built around fundamental athletic movements. From early childhood through maturity, people go through several stages of development. For each development stage, there is a corresponding phase of athletic training. In depth sports science studies clearly show that if children don’t capture the fundamental movement and basic athletic skills at the appropriate time in their development, they will have limited success no matter what sport they’re involved in.

Long Term Athletic Development (LTAD)

Long Term Athletic Development describes the lifelong athletic performance model originally coined by Dr. Istvan Bayli in 1990. Acknowledged as a worldwide expert in LTAD and periodization of training plans, Dr. Balyi is a member of the Titleist Performance Institute Advisory Board and is the resident sports scientist at the National Coaching Institute in British Columbia. At Fusion Golf Academy, we are proud to build our Junior Golf Development programs around the LTAD model - and believe strongly that this approach gives young golfers the best opportunity to reach their true potential.

Athletes First Rule

To put LTAD into practice, we have an “Athletes First Rule” at Fusion Golf Academy. This rule refers to our goal to create physical literacy in every student through our philosophy that children should progress from basic fundamental movement skills to fundamental sports skills - in that order. This is the natural progression from simple functional movement to more complex and specific athletic movement.

Skipping over the basic movement skills and jumping into sport skills to early will severely limit the potential of the young athlete. Physical literacy also includes having a basic physical fitness foundation - setting up the young athlete to have the maximum chance for success.