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The Nth Degree THE GYM FOR ATHLETES....
Develop the speed, power, strength, fitness and movement capabilities requ

A question we get a lot: do you test them? Yes. Here is what happens to it.We do test. Jumps, sprints, how they move, ho...
23/10/2026

A question we get a lot: do you test them? Yes. Here is what happens to it.

We do test. Jumps, sprints, how they move, how they hold up across a session. It all goes in a file.

We just do not read it out.

Hand an eleven-year-old a ranking and they learn the ranking. They work out where they sit, they carry it into every session after that, and from then on training is about defending a number instead of getting better at a thing. That habit lasts. It is a nightmare to unpick at fifteen.

So the numbers are ours. They tell us whether the block worked, whether someone has grown four centimetres and quietly lost their landing, whether a program needs changing this week instead of next term. That is a coaching tool and it should stay one.

What the athlete gets is the other half of it. This is what we are working on. This is what better looks like. This is the thing you did today that you could not do in June.

Same information. Completely different thing to carry.

One thing to watch for next time you are on the sideline.Not when they run. When they stop.Watch their feet in the last ...
23/10/2026

One thing to watch for next time you are on the sideline.

Not when they run. When they stop.

Watch their feet in the last two steps before they change direction. A young athlete who has never been taught will usually take one extra step, plant flat, and be a beat late coming out of it.

The one who has been taught gets wide on the outside foot, drops, and is already turning as they land.

You do not need to coach it from the fence. You are not their coach and that is not your job on a Saturday.

But once you have seen the difference you will not stop seeing it.

We do not run an A group and a B group.Not because we are soft on standards. Because at this age the grouping would be w...
21/10/2026

We do not run an A group and a B group.

Not because we are soft on standards. Because at this age the grouping would be wrong inside a year, and every athlete in the room knows exactly which letter you put them in.

There is one room. There is a coach watching the reps. There is a standard, and it is the same standard for the eleven-year-old who is already big and the eleven-year-old who is going to be big in 2029.

They will get measured plenty. By other people, at other places, for the rest of their sporting life. They will collect a lot of letters.

Just not here.

This is the single most common thing parents tell us they noticed in the first fortnight. Nobody in there knows who is supposed to be the best.

"They're too young for the gym."We hear it most weeks, usually from a parent who has already gone looking and come back ...
21/10/2026

"They're too young for the gym."

We hear it most weeks, usually from a parent who has already gone looking and come back with nothing.

They are right, and they are answering the wrong question.

A ten-year-old is too young for what most people picture when they hear the word gym. They are too young to be handed a program and left to it. They are too young to be treated like a small adult who happens to be shorter, which is exactly what happens to a lot of them in a room built for someone else.

None of that is an argument for waiting.

At this age the work is body-weight control, posture, balance and clean movement, coached progressively by someone standing next to them. Nobody gets loaded before they are ready. It looks almost nothing like the thing the word gym puts in your head.

The room is the whole answer. Ours was built for a ten-year-old, which is exactly why it does not look like a gym.

Every young athlete wants to be quicker.Almost every program sold to them starts there.Run better, then faster. Order ma...
19/10/2026

Every young athlete wants to be quicker.

Almost every program sold to them starts there.

Run better, then faster. Order matters, and we are not in a hurry with them.

"He'll grow into it" is the kindest sentence in junior sport and one of the most expensive.Kind, because it is usually t...
16/10/2026

"He'll grow into it" is the kindest sentence in junior sport and one of the most expensive.

Kind, because it is usually true. He probably will. Expensive, because it gets offered instead of a plan, and those are not the same thing.

The research on this is not subtle. Across junior systems, the athletes who get selected are disproportionately the ones born early in the selection year and the ones who matured early. One English academy audit found more than half of its selected players were born in the first quarter of the year, and that in the under fifteen and under sixteen squads there were no late maturing players left at all.

Not fewer. None.

A whole category of athlete had been filtered out. Not for ability. For timing.

Some clubs are trying to fix the selection end of it, grouping by maturity instead of by birthday. A systematic review this year says the idea is promising and that the evidence is not settled enough to hand anyone a rule yet. Fair enough. That is honest, and it is also not something a family can wait on.

Our end of it is simpler. If the environment is going to under-rate a late maturing athlete for three or four years, then those three or four years have to be worth something anyway. Movement. Strength that belongs to their age. Resilience. The appetite for work. Let the growth turn up and land on top of something.

None of this is a criticism of club coaches. They are picking a side to play on Saturday with the information in front of them. It is just worth knowing what that information is and is not measuring.

He probably will grow into it. What he grows into is the part you get a say in.

Almost no young athlete has ever been coached at the thing underneath their sport.They get coached at the sport itself e...
16/10/2026

Almost no young athlete has ever been coached at the thing underneath their sport.

They get coached at the sport itself every week. Someone shows them where to stand. What to do when the ball comes. How the game works, and where they fit in it.

What nobody teaches them is how to sprint. How to stop. How to change direction without losing a step. How to land.

They do all four of those every weekend. Nobody has ever stood next to them and said, here is what good looks like, try it again slower.

That is not the club's failing. A club coach has a team, a roster and a game on Saturday. There is no room in that session for teaching one athlete to decelerate, and it is not the job they signed up for.

Here is the part worth sitting with.

They learn how to run either way. Right now, every weekend, whatever way they happen to do it, and it is getting more practised every week.

The choice was never between coaching it and leaving it alone.

It is between coaching it, and letting it set by accident.

Track of the week: Lime Cordiale, Addicted to the Sunshine.On the Friday afternoon floor playlist. Bright and easy, a go...
16/10/2026

Track of the week: Lime Cordiale, Addicted to the Sunshine.

On the Friday afternoon floor playlist. Bright and easy, a good fit for the last session of the week now the days are getting longer. Summer sport is on its way.

"Pick one sport early or fall behind" is advice a lot of families hear.The research points the other way. Most athletes ...
15/10/2026

"Pick one sport early or fall behind" is advice a lot of families hear.

The research points the other way. Most athletes who reach the top played several sports growing up and narrowed down later. Training one sport all year from a young age is linked to more overuse injuries and more athletes walking away.

Play more than one. Choose later. The strength, speed and movement built in the gym carries into whichever one they keep.

A warm-up has more jobs than getting warm. Five we hold ours to.Raise the temperature. Warm muscle contracts faster and ...
13/10/2026

A warm-up has more jobs than getting warm. Five we hold ours to.

Raise the temperature. Warm muscle contracts faster and moves more freely.
Rehearse the session. The first jumps and sprints should look like a rough draft of the real ones.
Build to full speed. The fastest effort comes at the end of the warm-up, not on the first rep of the drill.
Switch the head on. A few minutes to leave school, the car and the phone at the door.
Show the coach how today looks. Stiff, flat or flying, it shows before the work starts, and the session can move with it.

Done well, it is the first part of the session. Not the bit before it.

Address

32 Magill Road
Norwood, SA
5067

Telephone

0422427126

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