How to Make Sports FUN for Kids

Are youth sports a symptom of a serious, widespread social disease? Or are they the salvation of our youth? The answer is neither. No reasonable person can deny that important problems do exist in some programs. On the other hand, surveys have shown that the vast majority of adults and children involved in sports find them to be an enjoyable and valued part of their lives. The bottom line is that sport programs are what we make of them. And if your son or daughter is playing a sport, you’re probably interested in making it the best possible experience.

What potential benefits can be obtained from participation in youth sports? 

Physically―Athletes can learn sport skills and increase their health and fitness.
Socially―Sports provide an opportunity to become part of an ever expanding network of friends and acquaintances.
Psychologically―Youngsters can develop leadership skills, self-discipline, respect for authority, competitiveness, cooperativeness, sportsmanship, and self-confidence. Moreover, sports can be just plain fun!

Why do kids play sports?

Surveys conducted in the United States and Canada indicated that young athletes most often list their sport goals in the following order of importance:

- To have fun.
- To improve skills and learn new ones.
- To be with friends or make new ones.
- For thrills and excitement.
- To win.
- To become physically fit.

The findings clearly indicate that the primary goal of professional athletes and many adults―winning―is far less important to children. What really matters to kids is having fun! So, the key to gaining life-long benefits from sports is to focus on participation and fun―not simply performance.

What about winning?

Winning is fun when it happens, and it’s great when your child has good coordination and athletic talent. But it’s also wise to be realistic about the abilities and attention span of typical young athletes. For example, it takes a certain amount of motor control and understanding for a youngster to master sport skills. But realistically, although some kids will intently focus on what’s happening in practices and games, you’ll see others goofing off. And that’s okay! It’s to be expected.

What’s important is the joy of the activity. As youngsters mature, they usually get more interested in playing sports the right way. However, at any age, it’s not the job of parents to push their children or live vicariously through them. The major role of parents is to support their children and enjoy the moment.

How can you help to promote fun?

- Be upbeat and excited about almost everything that happens.
- Find something to value and encourage in your child.
- Consistently reinforce indications of skill improvement, effort, and good teamwork. Say, for example, “I love how accurate you’re getting.” or “Way to go! You gave a lot of effort.” or “It’s great to hear you encouraging your teammates!”
- Look for opportunities to keep things in perspective. For example, if your child complains about losing a game, you might say, “Hey, I know how you feel, but everybody loses sometime. The important thing is to do your best and have fun.”
- Ask your child, “Did you have fun?” Hopefully, the answer will be “yes,” and you’ll see evidence of the joy of playing.

What if your child isn’t having fun?

It’s possible that your child isn’t developmentally ready to play a particular sport and follow the coach’s instructions. If that’s the case, you might consider shifting your child to another sport that’s a little easier or more suited to his or her abilities. There’s no need to rush a disinterested or poorly coordinated child into any sport. And let’s face it: Not every kid wants to be a future professional athlete. The ultimate objective is to do what’s best for your child―not what’s most pleasing to you.

Do you want to learn more about parenting young athletes?

The Mastery Approach to Parenting in Sports is a research-based video that emphasizes skill development, achieving personal and team success, giving maximum effort, and having fun. To access the video, go to the Youth Enrichment in Sports website: http://www.y-e-sports.org/

Source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/coaching-and-parenting-young-athletes/201308/how-make-sports-fun-kids

Fitness Instruction - How to use cones for fitness and fun - Kids drills

In this clip from our DVD called Agility and Quickness Drills, we use the Oncourt Offcourt Flex Cones for safety reasons since they collapse easily when stepped upon. And, the open sides make them more stable outside on windy days. For these exercises, just use a level surface like a gym floor, tennis court, playground or home driveway. www.oncourtoffcourt.com

There's a Reason Why Your Kids Aren't Playing - They're Not Good Enough

The fall sports season is reaching its zenith. Boys and girls at all levels and grades are running, stretching, planning and preparing for cross-town or cross-county rivals. Fall, especially in New England, is a wondrous time of year even if the Red Sox aren’t participating. [Here in Florida, it’s cause for a street party whenever the temperature falls below 70 during the day.]

For high school athletes, it means all those sweaty summer practices, workouts and sports-camps are finally going to pay some dividends.

The heart of any school athletic season brings with it busy schedules, frantic parents or older siblings driving kids from one field to the next, competition, camaraderie, joy, and disappointment.

One question every coach from Pop Warner and Youth Volleyball, on up through the highest levels high school competition in Texas, has heard in their coaching career is this:

“Why isn’t my kid playing?”

This topic came up in the wake of a column that ran in the Boston Globe last week about the lack of play for some in youth sports.

The absurdity of many “win-at-all-cost” coaches in youth sports is neatly matched by the fanaticism of “play-my-kid-or-else” parents at the high-school level.

When the games start to count, the main reason why your kid isn’t playing is simple:

“They’re just not good enough.”

“He/she just isn't fast enough.”

“He/she just isn’t strong enough.”

“He/she just isn’t tall enough.”

“He/she is too fat/too skinny.”

“He/she just didn’t try hard enough in practice.”

“He/she should not play over Jimmy/Jenny because they're faster, quicker, stronger, taller, and/or try harder.”

Good coaches, however, are not usually that blunt or honest.

We’ll focus on football for the rest of this conversation. Although much here applies to all sports, regardless of the game or gender. Many coaches are notorious for not telling what you and I would consider the “truth.”

The coach of New England’s NFL entry has mastered that skill. And high school coaches who fancy themselves as the “Belichick of the _______ League” are likely to follow his lead.

Parents get a little nutty at times when it comes to their children and youth/high school sports. Nearly every parent ever [this one included], at one time or another in the dark recesses of their minds, fancies a scenario where their son or daughter can master this or that sport well enough to earn a free-ride to college. When that dream/delusion is squashed after meeting the reality of genetics, talent, and/or interest, it’s hard to reconcile.

For the parents, that is.

The thing is that many kids know what they’re good at, and what they’re not good at. When it comes to football, for instance, most of the middle-schoolers or freshman already know the one or two kids who are good enough to play on the varsity team. And be the ones likely to catch the eye of a college recruiter. Their parents do not.

The rest play because they enjoy it, need the discipline, want to belong to a team, have dreamed of it since they were 5 or 6, are trying to make their parents happy, need a varsity sport on their college application, or some combination thereof.

There is another level of high school athlete, the non-elite, that encompasses about 99 percent of those who play high school and/or youth sports. They’re the ones whose career in organized athletics will end with their final high school game. Some of these kids are very talented and skilled. They’re able to throw the ball AND catch the ball, much to the delight of Gisele Bundchen. They can beat anyone in a footrace. They can bench twice their body weight.

Others possess marginal athletic skills, but make up for it practice, by getting stronger and quicker, and with on-field effort.

And no matter how much little Billy tries, no matter how much little Billy wants to play, there’s no guarantee that he will play. [Unless he’s participating in a league that mandates or guarantees playing time.] Participating in high school sports, for instance, is no different than any other education experience. You learn about winning and losing. You learn about bad calls and bad breaks. And some kids just aren't good enough to play, at least on a routine basis.

Far too many children today are living in a world where they never learn "no." They don’t know how to handle disappointment and failure. Nor do they know how to react and move on when they don’t get their own way. Interacting with actual people, and not just the screens on their iPhones or iPads, is a challenge, if not an impossibility. I won’t call this “abuse,” but it’s pretty damn close.

This is a world constructed by “well-meaning” but dangerously naïve parents. The children know no better because this is what they’re taught. Real-life doesn't come with "Participation Awards," "8th-Place Trophies" or laudatory bumper-stickers telling everyone that you're able to do your job without screwing up.

Playing a team sport, like football, with the right coaching can help students learn life’s difficult lessons, including Mick Jagger’s truism that “you can’t always get what you want.”

The joy of winning, the life-time friendships that are crafted among teammates, the sense of accomplishment and, for some, that varsity letter, makes the effort worth the risk. Some kids just aren't good enough to play at any competitive level . This is not a moral judgment. They’re too big, too small, too slow, don’t work hard enough off the field, or aren’t physically strong enough to be safe while being on the field against better athletes who won’t take it easy on them.

It sucks when your kid isn’t playing. Been there, done that. No reasonable parent wants to see their child hurt. But no one escapes this life unhurt, emotionally if not physically.

When these kids move on in life, they are going to get rejected when they apply for college, turned down when they ask out someone for a date, fail to get the job they want, the shift they want at work, and taste failure and disappointment on multiple fronts.

Legitimate safety concerns aside, coaches should try to get make sure everyone gets some playing time. But that should never come at expense of other kids who are more talented, try harder or spend more time practicing.

My son earned a starting spot senior year on his varsity football team. When it became evident he wasn't going to play much after the first few weeks of the season, he made the difficult decision to leave the team. He focused full-time on his studies and conditioning, so he could qualify for a military scholarship. The sophomore who replaced him is now playing at a Div. I-AA school on scholarship. This turned out to be a great decision for my son, who is a third-year US Army ROTC cadet. Win-win.

Their coach wasn't very good, and would be fired before my son graduated. This taught my son another important life-lesson: All your bosses aren't going to be great. Sometimes, leadership is going fail and take everyone down with it.

No child should be forced to play sports. And no child should ever go out for any team thinking they're going to be guaranteed a spot or playing time, no matter how loudly their parents complain. There is, however, much on the upside to playing team high school sports that barely gets mentioned nowadays.

In that sense, sports is a true metaphor for life. No one is guaranteed "playing" time in life. For the most part, hard work, effort, planning and desire is rewarded. The benefits can be wonderful. But it’s good to prepared when it doesn’t work out that way.

The OBF column is written by award-winning journalist and Bay State native Bill Speros. Bill has written and reported for ESPN, CBSSports.Com and was a sports/deputy sports editor at several metro daily newspapers. Reach Bill on the OBF Facebook page, on Twitter @realOBF or at his
OBF email Address. Thanks always for reading.

Source: http://www.boston.com/sports/blogs/obnoxiousbostonfan/2014/10/were_about_a_month_or.html?p1=Must_Reads_hp

Why playing freeze tag will make you a better parent (and athlete)

We gathered on the field, scattered across the green expanse. The four of us eyed each other cautiously. All of a sudden, we each started running across the field as fast as we could, darting in different directions and trying to escape my husband’s hands.

We were playing freeze tag and Ed was “It”.

I can’t remember the last time that I played freeze tag. It must have been elementary school. When Jasper asked if we could play together, my first instinct was to groan and find a way out of it. The last thing I wanted to do was run around and play tag.

But for some reason, both Ed and I agreed and we set out on a harried game. It was the most fun I have had in a long time.

I sprinted and laughed and screamed. I let go. I felt carefree.

As a grown-up and as a parent, there are so many roles we play. Most of those roles revolve around being responsible and pulled together – in short, to be an adult. But that doesn’t mean (shouldn’t mean) that we forget how to be carefree.

I think it was one of the few times that my kids have seen me with my guard down, completely down. I think that they need to see that every once in a while. I think that they need to see Mommy and Daddy running around and acting silly. I think that they need to see Mommy and Daddy as human beings.

While I am saying this a little tongue-in-cheek, freeze tag is a great way to sneak in a workout and some extra activity. It’s true!

Here are 5 additional benefits to playing freeze tag:
1) Speed work: It’s like a fartlek workout – a creative, less structured form of interval training.
2) Agility training: Darting back and forth plus quick changes in direction are sure to increase your agility.
3) Mental training: You have to be in-the-moment and focused. If you’re not, you’re likely to be tagged.
4) Strategic Thinking: You need to strategize how to get around the person who is “It” in order to un-freeze the other players.
5) Teamwork: Building on #4, you have to work together with the other players in other to beat the person who is “It”. Some players need to distract the person who is “It” while others zoom in to un-freeze the other players.

When was the last time you played freeze-tag?

Source: http://www.lovelifesurf.com/freeze-tag/

Auburn's Secret Sauce: Beet Juice

Auburn's Secret Sauce: Beet Juice
The Nitrate-Rich Beverage Is Fueling the Fifth-Ranked Tigers; 'The Worst Thing in the Entire World'

Behind every championship team is a strategy that may sound strange to everyone else. Auburn's happens to taste that way, too.

Beyond the usual explanations for Auburn's remarkable rise from 3-9 in 2012 to winning the Southeastern Conference last year is a secret that hadn't been revealed until now. Over the last two seasons, the Tigers have been experimenting with an elixir-like potion.

"We were doing beet juice," says Auburn dietitian Scott Sehnert.

Before each game, between team warm-ups and the opening kickoff, Auburn's staff distributes small pouches of beetroot concentrate. The players swirl the beetroot crystals around their water bottles and then slug the deep-purple concoction—which they don't exactly savor.

"The worst thing in the entire world," said Auburn tight end C.J. Uzomah. "It is nasty."

But they aren't drinking it for the taste. In recent years, sports scientists have seized on the discovery that beetroot juice is rich with nitrate. That has led to multiple studies revealing possible performance benefits that range from increased muscle efficiency to decreases in fatigue levels.

Beetroot juice, in other words, could energize players with that extra oomph as the game goes on. Last season, for example, Auburn won four games despite trailing in the fourth quarter, including their win-for-the-ages over rival Alabama. Auburn tied that game in the final minute and then won it on a game-ending 100-yard missed field-goal return.

Now, in their second season with the stuff, more than half of Auburn's players bite the beetroot-juice bullet. But it didn't go down so easily at first. Uzomah was baffled when Sehnert told Auburn's players about the wonders of gulping beetroot juice. His initial reaction: "Dude, seriously?"

This idea isn't exclusive to Auburn, which is 2-0 and ranked No. 5 heading into Thursday's game at No. 20 Kansas State. The list of beetroot juicers in college football includes the University of Texas, where Longhorns dietitian Amy Culp introduced beetroot juice to the football team's nutritional nuts, who used their locker-room influence to sell their teammates. Culp aims for Texas' athletes to drink beetroot juice at least three times a week, she said.

In the NFL, the Houston Texans were early adopters. Before it was widely available as a concentrate, they sent interns to grocery stores to buy all the beetroot juice they could find. Roberta Anding, the team's dietitian at the time, protected Houston's habit as if it were the team playbook.

"I'd be at sports nutrition and medicine meetings," she said, "and I wouldn't tell anybody we were doing this."

How beetroot juice joined Gatorade and water as the drinks du jour in college football is almost as peculiar as the taste itself.

In 2007, Lawrence Mallinson, the managing director of James White Drinks, which produces Beet It, learned that beetroot juice sales were about to spike as a result of physiologists finding that its heavy dose of nitrate lowers oxygen demands during exercise.

Sports scientists and endurance athletes were suddenly interested in beetroot juice. But they caught the industry by surprise. The nitrate in beetroot juice varies by the glass, meaning some athletes were getting more than others, while laboratories would see skewed results in their beetroot-related experiments.

The other problem was that drinking beetroot juice by the half-liter wasn't palatable as a pregame snack. "Bloody hell, that's an awful lot of juice," one rugby team told Mallinson, he said.

What they needed to do was come up with a way to reduce the amount of juice while controlling the amount of beetroot—which is how they came up with concentrated beetroot shots.

Some beetroot-juice makers are catering to athletes who can't stand the flavor. Neogenis Sport, an Austin-based company that stocks more than 30 pro and college teams with BeetElite, created a sweeter, black-cherry alternative, said sports nutritionist Tricia Griffin. James White Drinks in England rolled out an oatmeal bar stuffed with beetroot concentrate to mask the bitterness of its Beet It product.

But there are the extreme beetroot-juice converts who swallow it through gritted teeth before their workouts. "The serious sports world is used to taking dollops of absolutely horrible stuff," said Mallinson.

The growing body of beetroot-related sports research is still in its infancy. So far, it has focused on continuous endurance activities, like long-distance running and cycling. The overall sports value of nitrate supplementation requires more research, said the scientists who specialize in the matter.

But one paper last year in the European Journal of Applied Physiology examined beetroot juice in an unexplored context: team sports. The researchers simulated the intense but intermittent activity patterns in football and soccer—and found evidence of performance boosts similar to those in earlier studies. "It's pretty fascinating," said Andrew Jones, a University of Exeter physiologist who co-wrote the study, "that something as humble as the beetroot can exert such profound effects."

And it seems to have caught on in Auburn's locker room, of all places. Sehnert, the team's dietitian, estimates that 70% of players finished their beetroot juice before the Tigers' last game. "It's an acquired taste," Uzomah said.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/auburns-secret-sauce-beet-juice-1410978433

The Race to Nowhere In Youth Sports

“My 4th grader tried to play basketball and soccer last year,” a mom recently told me as we sat around the dinner table after one of my speaking engagements. “It was a nightmare. My son kept getting yelled at by both coaches as we left one game early to race to a game in the other sport. He hated it.”

“I know,” said another. “My 10 year old daughter’s soccer coach told her she had to pick one sport, and start doing additional private training on the side, or he would give away her spot on the team.”

So goes the all too common narrative for American youth these days, an adult driven, hyper competitive race to the top in both academics and athletics that serves the needs of the adults, but rarely the kids. As movies such as “The Race to Nowhere” and recent articles such as this one from the Washington Post point out, while the race has a few winners, the course is littered with the scarred psyches of its participants. We have a generation of children that have been pushed to achieve parental dreams instead of their own, and prodded to do more, more, more and better, better, better. The pressure and anxiety is stealing one thing our kids will never get back; their childhood.

The movie and article mentioned above, as well as the book The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, highlight the dangerous path we have led our children down in academics. We are leading them down a similar path in sports as well.

The path is a race to nowhere, and it does not produce better athletes. It produces bitter athletes who get hurt, burnout, and quit sports altogether.

As I said to my wife recently, the hardest thing about raising two kids these days, when it comes to sports, is that the vast majority of the parents are leading their kids down the wrong path, but not intentionally or because they want to harm their kids. They love their kids, but the social pressure to follow that path is incredible. Even though my wife and I were collegiate athletes, and I spend everyday reading the research, and studying the latest science on the subject, the pressure is immense. The social pressure is like having a conversation with a pathological liar; he is so good at lying that even when you know the truth, you start to doubt it.  Yet that is the sport path many parents are following.

The reason? FEAR!


We are so scared that if we do not have our child specialize, if we do not get the extra coaching, or give up our entire family life for youth sports, our child will get left behind. Even though nearly every single parent I speak to tells me that in their gut they have this feeling that running their child ragged is not helpful, they do not see an alternative. Another kid will take his place.  He won’t get to play for the best coach. “I know he wants to go on the family camping trip,” they say, “but he will just have to miss it again, or the other kids will get ahead of him.”

This system sucks.

It sucks for parents, many of whom do not have the time and resources to keep one child in such a system, never mind multiple athletes. There are no more family trips or dinners, no time or money to take a vacation. It causes parents untold stress and anxiety, as they are made to feel guilty by coaches and their peers if they don’t step in line with everyone else. “You are cheating your kid out of a scholarship” they are told, “They may never get this chance again.”

It sucks for coaches who want to develop athletes for long term excellence, instead of short term success. The best coaches used to be able to develop not only better athletes, but better people, yet it is getting hard to be that type of coach. There are so many coaches who have walked away from sports because while they encourage kids to play multiple sports, other unscrupulous coaches scoop those kids up, and tell them “if you really want to be a player, you need to play one sport year round. That other club is short changing your kid, they are not competitive.” The coach who does it right gives his kids a season off, and next thing you know he no longer has a team.

And yes, most importantly, it sucks for the kids. Any sports scientist or psychologist will tell you that in order to pursue any achievement activity for the long term, children need ownership, enjoyment and intrinsic motivation.  Without these three things, an athlete is very likely to quit.

Children need first and foremost to enjoy their sport. This is the essence of being a child. Kids are focused in the present, and do not think of long term goals and ambitions. But adults do. They see “the opportunities I never had” or “the coaching I wish I had” as they push their kids to their goals and not those of the kids.

They forget to give their kids the one thing they did have: A CHILDHOOD! They forget to give them the ability to find things they are passionate about, instead of choosing for them. They forget that a far different path worked pretty darn well for them.

So why this massive movement, one that defies all science and psychology, to change it?

We need to wise up and find a better path.

Parents, start demanding sports clubs and coaches that allow your kids to participate in many sports. You are the customers, you are paying the bills, so you might as well start buying a product worth paying for. You have science on your side, and you have Long Term Athletic Development best practices on your side. Your kids do not deserve or need participation medals and trophies, as some of you are so fond of saying, but they do deserve a better, more diverse youth sports experience.

Coaches, you need to wise up as well. You are the gatekeepers of youth sports, the people who play God, and decide who gets in, and who is kicked to the curb. You know the incredible influence of sport in your life, so stop denying it to so many others. Are you so worried about your coaching ability, or about the quality of the sport you love, to think that if you do not force kids to commit early they will leave? Please realize that if you are an amazing coach with your priorities in order, and you teach a beautiful game well, that kids will flock to you in droves, not because they have to, but because they want to!

Every time you ask a 9 year old to choose one sport over another you are diminishing participation in the sport you love by 50%. WHY?

To change this we must overcome the fear, the guilt and the shame.

We are not bad parents if our kids don’t get into Harvard, and we are not bad parents if they do not get a scholarship to play sports in college. We should not feel shame or guilt every time our kid does not keep up with the Jones’s, because, when it comes to sports, the Jones’s are wrong.

As this recent article from USA Lacrosse stated, college coaches are actually looking to multi sport athletes in recruiting. Why? Because they have an upside, they are better all around athletes, they are not done developing, and they are less likely to burnout.

You cannot make a kid into something she is not by forcing them into a sport at a very young age, and pursuing your goals and not your child’s goals. Things like motivation, grit, genetics and enjoyment have too much say in the matter.

What you can do, though, is rob a child of the opportunity to be a child, to play freely, to explore sports of interest, to learn to love sports and become active for life.

Chances are great that your children will be done with sports by high school, as only a select few play in college and beyond. Even the elite players are done at an age when they have over half their life ahead of them. It is not athletic ability, but the lessons learned from sport that need to last a lifetime.

Why not expose them to as many of those lifelong lessons as possible?

Why not take a stand?

Why don’t we stop being sheep, following the other sheep down a road to nowhere that both science and common sense tells us often ends badly?

It is time to stop being scared, and stand up for your kids. Read a book on the subject, pass on this article to like minded people, bring in a speaker to your club and school, but do something to galvanize people to act.

There are more of us who want to do right by the kids than there are those whose egos and wallets have created our current path. We have just been too quite for too long. We have been afraid to speak up, and afraid to take a stand. We are far too willing to throw away our child’s present for some ill fated quest for a better future that rarely materializes, and is often filled with so much baggage that we would never wish for such a future for our kids.

If you think your child will thank you for that, then you probably stopped reading awhile ago.

But if you want to get off the road to nowhere in youth sports, and to stop feeling guilty about it, then please know you are not alone. Our voice is growing stronger every day. We can create a new reality, with new expectations that put the athletes first.

We can put our children on a road to somewhere, one paved with balanced childhoods, exploration, enjoyment, and yes, multiple sports.

Someday our kids will thank us.

Source: http://stevenashyb.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-race-to-nowhere-in-youth-sports/

Stealing Second and Third Base: The Secret are in the Hands

Baseball and spring training is around the corner.  See my previous post on the 60 yard dash here and here.

Adarian Barr was one of the first coaches to say that the hands were the most important aspect in setting a PB in the 100 meter sprint.  He was willing to help anyone who listened, to the point where he got banned from a popular Track forum for “advertising”.

At the time, coaches were over analyzing stride rate, stride frequency, and ground contact the point of nausea.

The hands and arms are important.  If you want quick hands, see my training article on how to use a speedbag.

Even in the 100 meter starting blocks, I often wore a watch on my left hand with my right foot in the rear blocks.  This way, I would focus on having my left hand exploding when the gun went off.  The left hand initiates the (posterior) chain reaction.

I asked Lee Taft from http://www.basestealing.com his opinion, and here was his response.

*********************************************************************************
For many years, I have spoken about how important the hand speed is to an explosive start in base stealing. There are other sports where this concept applies as well, but none, in my opinion, are more important than the action of the hands when jumping.
I mention the hands, but obviously they are attached to your arms; so the arms must move quickly as well. The point is that I want the base runner to put his focus in the hands getting started. In other words, don’t tell him to have the shoulders move first and let the lower arm and hands follow behind. The hands should initiate the action.

Here is an excerpt from my Base Stealing Manual on the importance of the hands:

Arms and Hands

The arms are bent and the hands are relaxed. Once the player decides to take off, the arm action is actually the first movement by milliseconds. The arms cannot be left behind. If they are, the player will be slightly delayed in getting into the acceleration phase of the steal. By focusing on the hands moving first, the legs will drive harder and quicker, and the upper body will turn to face second much quicker. Every little bit helps!

The arms will go from the relaxed position in front of the body immediately into the running action and in opposition of the leg action.

The right arm gets driven back (as the shoulders turn) while the left arm drives forward in the up position of acceleration.

The shoulders and upper body rotate with the arms and set the body up for an optimal acceleration position.
If the arms are slow to rotate into the running position, the upper body gets "blocked" and doesn’t rotate as quickly. This hinders the power and effectiveness of the first step of acceleration.

When the arms and hands rotate quickly this action causes a reaction of the left leg to push quickly and aggressively into the ground. This is extremely helpful in gaining a big jump. So get the arms and hands moving quickly!

When coaches teach their players to rotate the arms away from second, or hold the arms long, or whatever other fancy technique they use, the effects are harmful to the first move from a biomechanical and force production standpoint.

Theses actions can delay the arms from getting into the running position as quickly as possible.

When the arms must rotate from a farther position than in front of the body, there can be a rotational force of the arms that spins the body away from second base. Don’t allow the arms to get away from the body and create a centrifugal force. Try to keep the arms moving in as straight of a line as possible.

Finally, when a player is taught to rotate the arms toward the second base to get into the running arm position as soon as possible, the action reaction between the movement of the arms and the reaction of the left leg pushing into the ground is greatly diminished.

For more information on base stealing, visit Lee Taft’s http://www.basestealing.com

Source: http://speedendurance.com/2011/02/22/stealing-second-third-base-secret-are-in-the-hands/