Games are a really important part of the Oly 4 Kids program. The purpose is to practice the position or the movement over and over, because repetition improves a skill. The game makes it fun to repeat these positions or skills. You can make up games yourself. The Oly 4 Kids book and program includes games, but they are just suggestions or examples.

Musical Monkeys is the well known game of Musical Chairs, but instead of dropping onto a chair the kids drop into the Standing Monkey. Make sure they hold that position, and make it a requirement that they get all aspects of it right before they release it. Coaches should join in. You will be surprised how hard it is to simply hold the position and it will make you realise how significant it is to use all parts of your body to have a tight and strong start position; the Standing Monkey.

There are a lot of games you can make up to practice the Proud Grasshopper. Use your imagination, make a workout circuit or even adapt the Musical Monkeys game to Grasshoppers instead. You can mix that game up so that each time the music stops you put your hands in a different place, as per the Proud Grasshopper positions. These three positions of hands on shoulders, elbows pointed forward and hands overhead assimilate the 3 squat positions of back squat, front squat and overhead squat.

But the game we have found to be a popular one with the kids is the Proud Grasshopper Box Ladder. You place soft boxes (used for box jumps) in a spaced out row with the box heights staggered from the lowest to the highest. Then the kids jump on the boxes landing in a squat (Proud Grasshopper); hands on shoulders on the first box, elbows pointing forward on the second box and hands overhead on the third box. I know this seems pretty simple, but the kids love it. It never seems to get old.

This is a little add-in, adhoc activity that I created at some point that we quite regularly pull out for the kids. And I mean kids of ALL ages. Sometimes the kids have just absorbed all they can for that day and an activity to fill the time slot, while they are still learning something relevant, is required. Here is one of those activities.

There is a colour in sheet in the downloads area which has all of the Olympic Weightlifting weights, including the small incremental ones. I always have some colouring pencils or pens in the kids area of the gym, and we have these out for this exercise. Give every child a colouring in sheet and tell them to find out what colour each plate is and colour it in correctly on their sheet. A fun fact I tell the kids if they can't find the right plate to see what colour it is, is that all the big plates have matching colour small plates if you divide by 10. Only the older kids will be able to make use of this fact, but it is a fun fact all the same.

For the gyms that only have all black plates you may need to have a picture on hand of an olympic weightlifter with all the correct colours. Kids may ask why different weights are different colours. This gives you the opportunity to talk about the Olympics and athletes that get so good they go all the way to the Olympics. Of course all calibrated bumper plates are coloured, which is why it is an important piece of information for anyone to know. I have heard stories of kids being about to tell their parents how heavy the bar is "because they know weightlifting mathematics"!

This information will come in very handing when the kids reach Oly 4 Kids Level 2 - "Own the Bar", and they have to load real weights on real bars. It may only be 4kg or 5 kg but it is the start of them learning how to load a bar, and probably more importantly it give them a purpose for learning maths at school because now they see an application for it. I have had parents tell me that their kids have improved in school maths and in confidence in general from doing weight training, so this exercise can prove to be very useful.

For Scally the Scarecrow we play a good old original Scarecrow tag game. You may know this game from your childhood, but it has been adapted just a bit.

Set an area that is the play zone, where it is safe for kids to run and play without getting hurt. Then choose someone who is "it". When the game starts the "it" person needs to try and tag whoever they can. If you get tagged, you need to stop where you are and stand in a Scally the Scarecrow position. You need to just wait until someone else comes to save you by crawling through your legs. While that person is saving you, they are safe and can't be tagged. When they get fully through the legs of the Scarecrow person both kids are then free to run again. The object of the game for the "it" person is to catch everyone and have a field of scarecrows. The object of everyone else is to keep as many people as possible free. This is a really fun game that is enjoyed by all. Play it anytime you just want the kids to have fun or blow off a bit of steam.

Kids love doing box jumps! So creating good exercises that are good for the kids learning and are fun at the same time, is really easy. Use you imagination, and in corporate characters if you like.

Teaching ledge jumps is important as it helps to have the correct mind-body connection as you lift. When a lifter wants to drive the weight upwards, it is vital that they drive their force through the heels and not the balls of their feet. But it is difficult to get this idea across to athletes while teaching them the dip and drive position. If you learn the dip while jumping from a ledge which only supports the heels, you will have no choice but to push through the heels. There is the added advantage that if you do not go straight up and straight down, you will not land as safely and solidly. That’s why you stand on a ledge.

Now I should point out at this stage that the ledge cannot be any higher than about 10cm, the height of a competition platform. Obviously, we need to cater the unfortunate circumstance of not getting this right straight away, because believe me—adults don’t, so why should kids? You want to make it safe so that when they miss the ledge on landing, it will only be a small step down to catch themself. Any raised position can be used as a ledge. Even a larger bumper plate, like a 25kg plate, would suffice, although they do usually have a lip around the edge which would not make it easy to push from. So put some thought into what you can use as a ledge.

The learning outcome points are:

• Dip and drive on your heels.

• That’s it!