Your Athlete
Has Another Gear.
This Is How
It Gets Built.
Most competitive athletes are working hard and not moving up. The problem isn’t effort. It’s sequence — and a window that closes faster than anyone tells you. This is the full system.
Every parent who walks into this gym carries some version of the same question. It comes out different ways — “He’s working so hard, why isn’t it showing up?” or “She was ahead of everyone two years ago, what happened?” — but it’s always the same thing underneath. Something is off and nobody has been able to say what it is. This page is the answer.
I’ve been watching this pattern for over twenty years, first in Olympic programs in China, now at Jungle Athletics in Calgary. The effort is real. The plateau is real. And the gap between them has a specific explanation, a specific sequence, and a specific window in which it can actually be fixed.
Four stages. The order they happen in. What each one means for your athlete right now.
First Gear.
I can usually see it in the first ten minutes.
The athlete comes in moving with real effort. Their brain is telling their legs to go, their arms are pumping, and the output looks like trying hard. But there’s a tell that shows up every time regardless of sport or age: the arms and the legs aren’t connected. The body is producing lots of noise and not much speed. Lots of effort, not much output.
This is First Gear. And most competitive young athletes — even good ones, even ones who’ve been in structured programs for years — are still in it.
First Gear isn’t about talent. It isn’t about effort. It’s about a movement system that hasn’t been built yet. The athlete is running on hardware that was never organized, and no amount of practice in their sport changes that, because their sport doesn’t address it.
Every human follows the same developmental sequence — the order the nervous system uses to build movement from the ground up. When steps in that sequence are skipped or rushed, the body writes workarounds. Those workarounds don’t disappear with age or training. They get faster. They get stronger. But they stay workarounds, baked into every sprint, every cut, every shift — until someone goes back and addresses the foundation itself.
We organize the body before we load it. That’s the first sentence out of my mouth when someone asks what we do differently. Everything else follows from that.
The reason the arms and legs aren’t connected is specific. It traces back to the pelvis. Think of a stationary bike. The reason you can transfer force from your legs into the pedals is that the crankshaft is completely stable — nothing flexes, nothing spills, every bit of energy goes where you intend it.
Your athlete’s core has to function the same way. When it doesn’t, when the pelvis tilts and the soup bowl spills, the body has to find stability somewhere else. It borrows from the arms. It borrows from the shoulders. The arms and legs stop coordinating because they’re no longer working off the same stable base. That’s the tell. That’s what I see in the first ten minutes.
“Lots of effort, not much output. The arms and legs aren’t connected. That’s First Gear — and it has nothing to do with talent.”
— Greg Almon, Jungle Athletics CalgaryParents describe the downstream effects without realizing they’re connected: good games followed by bad ones, high-effort weeks with nothing to show for them, physical ability that comes and goes. When the foundation isn’t stable, performance is inconsistent by definition. The body is constantly borrowing from itself, and you cannot borrow from yourself indefinitely.
What I tell parents at this stage: this is fixable. It is not a character problem. It is not a talent ceiling. It is a foundation problem, and foundation problems have a specific solution.
The Development Window.
This is the part I spend the most time explaining. Because once parents understand it, everything else makes sense — and the ones who are early enough to do something about it almost always do.
Between the ages of 8 and 14, the nervous system is doing something it will never do again. It isn’t just learning movements — it’s hardwiring them. Coordination patterns laid down during this window become structural. They compound over years. They transfer across sports. They become the raw material that everything athletic is eventually built on top of.
After 14, that process doesn’t stop. But it slows down significantly. At 8 through 14, you’re building. At 16 or 17, you’re patching. Patching works. But it never produces what building would have, and it costs far more time and effort for far smaller returns.
The research on sensitive periods is precise about this. Sports scientist Józef Drabik defines them as the times when “the organs and systems that determine a given ability are undergoing intensive development” — when they are “most receptive to a training stimulus developing that ability” (Children and Sports Training, p.12). His training principle follows directly: “training is most effective when it stimulates maturing abilities rather than those already matured.” You cannot train a window that has already closed. You can only work with what is still developing. I learned this from the research. I watched it confirmed in Olympic athletes in China over four years.
The city was industrial and grey. Cold in a way that gets into the building with you. The oval was old and run down and I walked in and looked at the athletes and I knew immediately.
They were overtrained. You could see it in their posture, the way they stood, the way they moved around the ice. Everything about them said exhausted — not tired from today, but tired from a long time of being pushed past what the system could absorb.
I stood there thinking: how am I supposed to make this team better?
I gave them a week off. The administrator thought I was out of my mind. The technical coach thought I was out of my mind. Everyone thought I was out of my mind.
But when I told the athletes, something changed in the room. Not excitement — something quieter. Relief. And underneath the relief, something that looked like trust. Because they had all felt it in their bodies for months and nobody had said it out loud. I had walked in, looked at them for ten minutes, and said: I see it. I see what you’re carrying.
Those athletes would have run through a wall for me after that. Not because I was a great coach. Because the body tells the truth — and I was willing to look at it.
Always plastic. Compounds forever. The one quality that never fully closes — every sport, every surface adds to the library.
The nervous system learns fast-twitch patterns most efficiently before adolescence. Once it matures, the rate of return drops sharply.
Acceleration, deceleration, direction change: installed now, they become structural. At 16 they’re rebuilt from scratch. Much harder. Much slower.
Expresses best post-puberty. Building too early consumes developmental bandwidth that belongs to coordination and speed. A sequencing error, not a commitment problem.
“Coordination patterns get hardwired — at 16 you’re patching, not building.”
— Greg Almon, Jungle Athletics CalgaryDrabik’s research identifies two peak windows within the broader 8–14 period: coordination develops fastest at ages 8–9 and again at 11–12, with the process effectively complete by 16–18 (Children and Sports Training, p.68). This is why the window grid above matters. The athlete who is buildable at 12 becomes patchable at 16. Not impossible — patchable. The effort required is the same. The return is not. Every year of the window that is still open is worth using deliberately.
Another Gear.
I know an athlete has found it before they do.
There’s a moment in training — it’s different for every athlete, it can happen weeks in or months in — but it is always unmistakable. The movement changes. Not incrementally. The whole feel of it shifts. The athlete separates from what they were doing before without appearing to try harder. They cover more ground per step. They’re arriving first to balls, first to positions, first to the sideline, without any visible increase in effort.
This is the moment the system starts working. This is Another Gear.
There was a ringette player, thirteen years old, who had been training with us for about four months. Quiet kid. Did everything we asked without complaint. Good athlete who moved like she was slightly apologizing for taking up space — soft first steps, braking by slowing down instead of stopping, never quite committing to the acceleration she was capable of.
We were doing a simple change-of-direction drill. Two cones, maybe eight feet apart. She’d done it fifty times over four months and it always looked like a decent athlete doing a drill.
On this particular Tuesday, she planted her left foot, and something different happened. The stop was sudden. The direction change was immediate. She was at the second cone before anyone in the room had processed that she’d already moved.
She looked at me like she was checking whether something had gone wrong.
Nothing had gone wrong. Her deceleration had become a weapon. The four months of foundation work had finally stacked. The nervous system had reorganized. And what came out the other side was an athlete who stopped so fast the defender flies past her.
The most important thing to understand about Another Gear is what it isn’t. It isn’t conditioning. It isn’t trying harder. It isn’t extra ice time or extra reps. Athletes who find Another Gear look smoother than the kids around them, not more intense. They look like they have more time, more space, more options.
In twenty years of coaching, I have never seen an athlete find Another Gear through effort alone. Effort is a prerequisite. But effort applied to a disorganized movement system produces more efficient disorganization. Another Gear comes from organizing the system and then loading it — in that order, always in that order.
“He found another gear.” · “She just separates now.” · “Everything looks faster.” · “He’s not even trying harder, he’s just first.”
My grandfather was a fighter pilot in World War Two. He flew Spitfires in North Africa. I grew up on his stories — the beauty of flight, the aerodynamics, the way a plane like that moves through the sky with a kind of majestic precision. And then it turns, drops altitude, lines up on a target, and opens up in an instant. Flames where there was nothing a second before.
That image was in my head when I finally had a name for what I’d been watching.
I was standing trackside at Altis Performance in Phoenix. Dan Pfaff and Stu McMillan’s program — some of the best sprinters on earth train there on any given day. We’d been watching athletes warm up for close to 80 minutes. Nothing had happened yet. The baseball coach next to me leaned over: “Is anything going to happen here today?”
Then the warmup ended.
The athletes went from a two to a nine in a fraction of a second. Not a seven. A nine. The air on that track changed — I felt it physically, the displacement of it as they came off the line. And then, seconds later, they went over the hurdles. Everything changed again. The same athletes who had just produced something that looked like a controlled detonation were now moving with a fluidity that was almost impossible to reconcile. Flowing at speed, rhythm and spatial precision all happening at once.
The violence and the smoothness arrived at exactly the same moment. In the same body. That was the picture I’d been looking for.
Grace is freedom of movement. It’s the athlete who seems to have more time, whose hips are loose, who finds the space before it opens. It comes from the nervous system having enough movement vocabulary to self-organize — enough sports, enough surfaces, enough variety fed in during the right window. You cannot drill it in. You can only create the conditions where the nervous system builds it itself.
Violence is force. Real, integrated, game-deciding amounts of it. Explosive acceleration. Sudden braking. The first step that arrives before the defender knows it’s coming. But it has to be built on a foundation. Add power to a disorganized system and you produce a faster version of the same problem. Grace comes first. Then violence.
“The violence and the smoothness arrived at exactly the same moment. In the same body. That was the picture I’d been looking for.”
— Greg Almon, Jungle Athletics CalgaryThe System Across Sports
Violent Grace is not sport-specific. The same system applies across every sport Jungle trains because the underlying biology doesn’t change. What changes is the vocabulary — the sport applies specific demands on top of the foundation. But you cannot skip to the sport-specific work. Every sport-specific capability is an expression of the underlying system, and the underlying system has to be built first.
What This Means for Your Athlete, Right Now
The question I get asked most, usually by a parent who has just read everything on this page and is doing the mental math on their athlete’s age: “Are we too late?”
The honest answer is: almost certainly not. But the window is not infinite, and the information is only useful if something is done with it while it still matters.
Coordination is always trainable. The window for coordination is always open. Everything else — speed, mechanics, movement skill — has a rate of return that peaks earlier than most parents know and doesn’t come back. Knowing that doesn’t mean you’ve lost. It means you have something specific to do, starting now, with a clear understanding of what you’re building and why.
“The nervous system will self-organize if you let it — but it needs the right inputs during the right window.”
— Greg Almon, Jungle Athletics CalgaryThe Free Athlete Analysis is 60 minutes. Bring your athlete. We’ll watch them move, tell you which stage they’re in, what’s limiting them, and what we’d prioritize building. No sales pressure. No generic program pitch. A real assessment of where they stand and what’s actually available to them.
Which Stage Is
Your Athlete In?
Book your athlete’s Free Athlete Analysis. 60 minutes. We’ll watch them move, tell you where they are in the system, and show you exactly what needs to be built — and when.
Book Your Free Athlete Analysis134 71 Ave SE · Calgary, AB T2H 0L9 · 403-462-8424
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