Inside Finland’s Youth Sports Strategy with Juuso Konttinen

Finland places importance on a sports diversification approach for youth athletes. In your experience as a PE teacher and coach, have you observed any correlation between youth athletes who participate in multiple sports during their formative years and their overall success and performance later on? If so, how do you believe this diversification in sports benefits their long term development?

Our approach in youth sports is based on international studies (e.g. De Bosscher et al. 2023) that show that most elite athletes specialize late to their main sport and stay in multiple sports until they are 15-16 years old.

My experience as a teacher and a coach is that most athletes that have diversified sport backgrounds have less stress related injuries, less burnout and generally have better game sense and more versatile skills than athletes that have specialized early to basketball or other sports.

I sincerely believe that a diversified background gives the athletes a better starting point to their athletic career and a physically active lifestyle later on in their life. They will have a better skill set to participate in many sports and to be active throughout their lifetime. In my honest opinion early specialization is short-sighted if we look at a person’s lifespan.

At what age should young athletes start with strenght and conditioning?

I think the most important thing with young athletes is to help them learn the fundamental movement skills of locomotion, handling different objects and balancing through plenty of training and repetition. The wider the base, the higher the pyramid will be one day.

I think that a child should be as physically active as possible until their peak height velocity. Most of this training should be fun and it should help them develop a great base for training later on. In Finland our national guideline for youth health is 2 hours of daily physical activity of which one hour will make you sweat and breathe heavy. For young athletes our goal is +20 hours a week of physical activity. Until the kid reaches peak high velocity most of the strength training should be bodyweight exercises. In my opinion the best sports to stay on are gymnastics and track and field.

What differences do you see between the strength and conditioning programs for young basketball, soccer and hockey players?

All these sports place a need for high VO2max and aerobic base for an athlete to train enough to reach the top level. Also there is a need for high relative strength in all these sports as well as a high rate of force development.

Hockey and basketball are more power related sports compared to soccer, which forces the coach in these sports to emphasize more strength and power related exercises and workouts.

Other main differences are ground contact times and vertical jump needs in all these sports. Basketball is a very quick sport that places a need for vertical and horizontal plyometric training. In hockey the athlete has more time to generate power compare to soccer and basketball and maximal strength play huge role in this equation.

A hockey stride is very different from soccer and basketball acceleration kinematics which causes need for lateral power development. Typical injuries in these sports are ankle, knee, hip and back injuries. Being a hard contact sport, hockey places the most needs for neck and shoulder strength and injury prevention.

What kind of warmup activities do you recommend for young athletes?

I use the RAMP model by Ian Jeffreys. R stands for “raise body temperature”, A stands for “activate”, M stands for “mobilize” and P stands for “potentiate”.

I recommend plenty of activity, less talking, fun drills and games for the athletes and persistence in executing the warm ups. Same drills night in and night out are not easy mentally, but doing stuff that works will keep you healthy in the long run.

As an assistant coach for the Finland youth basketball national team how often do you test the physical conditioning status of the young basketball players and how do you use this data?

We use an intermittent VO2max test (FIBA referee test) to start every camp and see the training status and the current level of conditioning of each athlete. This starts when the players are 14 and continues every year until they are in the U20 program. Later on in the true national team programs the players will be tested in 20m sprints and vertical jumps each year. We also use body mass related indexes in our main lifts (power clean, squat, bench).

The data is used to track the development and screen athletes that are suitable for the national team programs. Our experience is that players that are out of shape can not survive the training camps or the national team summer programs.

Do you think that the injury rates in youth sports are at rise? If yes, what would be the reason and how to prevent this?

I think we have more stress related injuries than we used to back 20-30 years ago. Back in the 90’s people in Finland used to take part in unorganized sports such as skating, cross country skiing and plenty of games played outside with no instructors. Phones, Ipads and laptops have changed all this and most of the kids that do sports take part in organized sports and don’t have a lot of physical activity outside of their chosen sports.

I think the main reason is too much sitting hours, too many screens and too much unhealthy food in the early years of our athletes before their teenage years.

When our athletes finally reach junior high school and we start training harder, their body and work capacity can’t handle the load anymore and we end up having stress fractures, tendon problems etc.

Finland has been making strides in basketball on the international stage. What do you attribute this success to, and how do you plan to build upon it in the future?

I think that the main reasons for the success of Finnish basketball are great leadership, high level of coaching education and high level of standards and expectations for each individual in our national team program.

The people in Finnish basketball association and Finnish club teams have worked hard to reach this level and will work hard in the future to keep it there. We have also succeeded to pass on the knowledge of our earlier generation of basketball through mentorship and coaching.

Our basketball academy programs such as Helsinki Basketball Academy, Jyväskylä Basketball Academy and Turku Basketball Academy are raising our new generations of players and our new coaching education system is helping our coaches get better year by year. There is nothing fancy, just work well done by a lot of people.