Which sport to choose based on age? | Martial Arts Larry Foisy

It is an organism in constant psychomotor evolution

Learning the gesture must respect the different phases of the child’s psychomotor and psychoaffective development. Each complex psychomotor mechanism and adjustment must be developed after the simpler preliminary stages have been well assimilated.

Between 2 and 5 years
We will talk about a physical and artistic education addressed through pleasure and play, oriented towards psychomotor support allowing the expression of the child’s basic psychomotor activity through movement and psychomotor stimulation which allows the acquisition of motor skills: locomotion, climbing, jumping, throwing, carrying, fine, imitative and expressive gestures. These skills will be available later, when faced with complex situations, memorizing numerous action programs, respecting the different phases of psychomotor and psychoaffective development. The child can join a Baby-Gym, Baby-judo or Baby-Karate club of the interested sports federations.

At 6-7 years old
The child enters the age of learning to write and read which will be facilitated by the acquisition of a good body image, thanks in particular to mini-sport, establishing the basis of physical condition: postural control, coordination, balance, laterality, orientation in space and time, trajectory, anticipation, positioning, etc. Experiment with gestures through games with rules; he puts himself in a competitive situation but does not like failures, which lead to discouragement and disinterest.

Between 8 and 12 years
Controls and disciplines his actions with the ability to maintain effort to achieve a goal. We move from sports initiation to improvement and competition which are an integral part of sports practice, which retains all its educational value if freely consented to and if it does not become coercion or even torture. It enhances the child, awakens in him the cult of effort and perseverance, the desire to succeed with willpower. It accelerates the decision-making process, allows you to assert yourself, externalize and channel reactions of aggression, dominance and opposition but with violence controlled by rigid rules, using «fair play». Learn to control the effects of stress. It contributes, through the interest it generates, to reducing idleness. It can, among students in academic difficulty, create an original center of interest that thus operates within the class, through a different hierarchy, thus facilitating socialization and reducing discouragement.

At 13-14 years old
This is the era of contradictions: improvement and questioning in a period of intensive training. But with the global reorganization of adolescence (morphological evolution, psychological instability, appearance of sexuality), the gesture becomes upset, less precise and less coordinated. Teenagers increasingly accept the authority of parents or even coaches. Competition declines in the scale of values, as does the need for competition, while he maintains a keen interest in non-competitive sport: the activity is therefore based on contact with the partner and on the development of team spirit.

Between 15 and 17 years old
During the second phase of puberty, physical proportions become more harmonious and psychological balance is restored. The adolescent regains a taste for training and performance, both collective and individual, when before he was definitely not disgusted by it.

Doctor Michel Binder
Pediatrician
Childhood and Adolescent Sports Medicine
Deputy National Federal Doctor of the French Gymnastics Federation
Expert at the Medical Commission of the International Gymnastics Federation
Federal Doctor of the French Federation of Underwater Studies and Sports

Paris, 11 September 2000