The First Sidmouth Running Club Juniors Group Gets Underway.

The first session for the Juniors got started on Sunday the 9th of June on the playing fields of the Sidmouth College.
Leaders of the Juniors, Kerry Boyle and Claire Ashby, will being showing the FUNdementals of athletics to the group of 23 youngster during the course. With mixed abilities and ages ranging from 8 to 12 years, the group has 11 girls and 12 boys.
During the warm up, the group looked into good running technique, included standing tall, arms driving and lifting the knees. The groups were then split into the 10-12 year olds with Claire and the 8-10 year olds with Kerry.
Kerry took her group to do some physical preparation which included learning how to do squats and balancing. With balancing the younger group played the Dice Game and Mirroring a partner. After the warm up they then moved into the main session which comprised of a running, throwing and jumping unit. With running they were learning how to run over obstacles, with the younger group establishing which leg they preferred to lead and also getting a feel of a good stride pattern between each hurdle whilst still retaining that tall posture. Next they moved on to the pull throw, which is the technique used in throwing the javelin, but we started with an overhead throw of a football, then bean bags and finally onto howlers. The last part (a group favourite), was jumping for distance in the sand pit. Initially they practiced doing a 2 legged standing jump, learning to use the arms to swing up, moving on to the one legged jump deciding on which was their stronger jumping leg and driving the other knee up, and finally jumping in the sand pit to see how far they could jump.
Claire’s group of 10 -12 year olds were a determined bunch and all worked very hard on the skills being focused on. They learned about finding which side of the body is more dominant and which foot is the easiest to balance on. This illustrated how balance and coordination are two of the essential skills for good running. They then practised hurdling, throwing and jumping.
Everyone had a great time and had a go at the activities and gave some great feed back. The children received an activity card, which they will hopefully all complete over the next 5 weeks.