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Monday 8am - 8pm Tuesday 8am - 8pm Wednesday 8am - 8pm Thursday 8am - 8pm Friday 8am - 8pm

Trial Athletics

Coaching-first performance training for youth and adult athletes in Los Alamitos, CA.

09/11/2026

Some ladder drills do turn the hips. Carioca, crossovers. That is fair.

Here is what none of them do. They never make him turn over a foot that
stays on the ground.

Researchers tested the ladder directly. U-13 soccer players did six weeks of
it, three extra sessions a week, supervised by a certified coach, with the
drills getting harder every two weeks. Against a control group doing nothing
extra, the ladder group improved on nothing. Not sprint. Not agility. Not
ball skills. (Padron-Cabo et al., 2020)

The ladder is not a bad drill. It trains foot placement and it does that
fine. It is just not a change of direction drill, and it gets sold as one.

SLANT BOARD HIP TURNS
He has to turn the hip to get the foot to 45 degrees and push off it.

BANDED BACKPEDAL TO HIP TURN
Moving one way, then opening the hips against resistance to leave another.

BANDED HIP SWITCHES
One loaded turn straight into the next, with nothing reset in between.

Save this and watch your athlete’s feet at practice this week. Count how
long they stay on the ground.

Trial Athletics. Los Alamitos.

08/24/2026

The #1 way to make your kid jump higher does not exist.

Not because jumping can’t be trained. Because there’s no single fix that works for every kid.

A jump comes down to two things. Force and spring. Force is how hard he pushes into the ground. Spring is how fast he releases it. Almost every kid is better at one than the other, and the fix for one does almost nothing for the other.

The springy kid bounces well, but there’s not much force behind it. More jumping just sharpens what he’s already good at. He needs to get stronger. Coached, and built for his age, not a kid loaded up under a heavy barbell.

The strong kid has plenty of force, he just can’t release it fast enough. More strength work piles on power he already can’t use. He needs to get springy. Reactive work, not more squats.

Here’s the part most people miss. Kids drill the side they’re already good at, because it’s the fun one. The springy kid keeps bouncing. The strong kid keeps grinding. That’s how a year of training gets wasted. You train the opposite of what he’s already good at.

The 10-second test you can run at home:
1. Have him jump and touch as high as he can from a standstill. Mark it.
2. Then let him take a few steps into it and jump. Mark it again.
Big gap between the two, his spring is already there, so train strength.

Almost no gap, his spring is asleep, so train that.

One catch. If he’s genuinely weak to start with, strength comes first no matter what the test says. There’s nothing to spring off of yet.

This is why we test the athlete instead of handing him a program off the internet. The program isn’t the problem. Pointing it at the wrong kid is.

Which one is yours? Comment SPRINGY or STRONG.

Address

10565 Bloomfield Street
Los Alamitos, CA
90720

Opening Hours

Monday	8am - 8pm
Tuesday	8am - 8pm
Wednesday	8am - 8pm
Thursday	8am - 8pm
Friday	8am - 8pm

Telephone

(562)3794520

Website

http://TrialAthletics.com/

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