YAM Science
This series of Books is the culmination of collaboration and asking the advice of professionals of differing specialties. They all consider themselves stakeholders in the future health of our youth.
Speed, agility, and reactivity training were once the secrets of top athletes in sports such as football, soccer, and rugby, but over the last two decades, this has changed. There is a movement afoot to use this training for all athletes, ages, and experience levels as well as for everyday fitness, adult functional movement training, and standard rehabilitation. While this may seem odd at first, we must acknowledge that times have changed. For many, many years children grew strong and agile naturally, through play and everyday chores at home. Outdoor playgrounds were filled with children happily enjoying hopscotch, tag, jumping rope, climbing jungle gyms, etc. The information age and technology have replaced these activities, and we find much of the youth indoors, viewing screens, which does nothing to create strong, agile bodies. This needs to change. Movement training can be a fun, practical addition to anyone's daily routine with the added benefit of keeping major joints and muscle groups healthy. Children are influenced by what they see in everyday life so parents should practice these basic movements along with the kids. Parents can be athletes too, and enjoy a healthier, less injury-prone lifestyle.
When basic precepts of neuroscience were added to the athletic training, we saw progressional changes not just in athleticism, but overall behavior. After attending the Carrick Neuroscience Conference in May of 2018 we gained a whole new perspective on perception, light, sound, and repetition's impact on behavior. Upon request, we can email or publish a link to this information, but to summarize, we saw a clear pathway to reaching children with positive information at a young age. When we transferred this knowledge to older athletes over time, we saw a change in their behavior during training and practice, but it would break down in stressful situations (fight or flight or crunch time in a game). We came to realize that they were reverting back to their base in these scenarios. The solution, get them young and correct the base.
So that's the beginning., that's when the concept of Young Athletic Movement was born. With your help we can expand and correct these early concepts into programs that can be useful for youth around the world, no matter their income, culture, religion, or any other social factor. We look forward to you helping us to turn this humble beginning into something that can help people all over the world.
Sight
After being introduced to vision training by Dr. Joseph Clarke a neuroscientist who was working up at the University of Cincinnati, we started researching how important vision was to the brain and neurological training. As a result, we use lots of primary colors, picture words and uncluttered illustrations to help young people remember the messages in our media.
Sound
We learned from taining athletes that not only are certain sounds get your attention, but particular rhythm patterns can affect your mood and get you ready to learn.
The Young Athletic Movement Series
uses rhyming, a rhythmic cadence and familiar words mixed in with the unfamiliar in order to stimulate learning and memory retention.
Repetition
From athletes, neuroscientists, teachers, and salesman (basically every professional we talked to) repetition is an absolute must to create and trigger any type of subconscious habit. We created this series with books that are a three to five-minute read time so that adults are more likely to read and two to six years olds are more likely to hold their attention to the lessons being taught within the series.