ST. LOUIS — Eric Lay, the head trainer at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School, loves to see student athletes succeed, but he and fellow trainers aren’t always impressed with fastballs or hat-tricks.

They’re more concerned about whether the athletes can do a decent push-up without their body undulating like a worm. Can they do leg lunges without flailing their arms, wobbling or falling to one side? Are they able to touch their toes? Pull up to their chin? Can they shuttle back and forth?

In a nutshell, trainers want to know whether these children really know how to properly and safely move, and later, can they add strength to those established movements?

Growing push

It’s all part of a growing push among trainers and others in fitness fields to get schools, parents, coaches and children back to basics with physical fitness. Instead of focusing primarily on acquiring fitness through organized youth sports — an exploding business with many well-meaning but poorly trained coaches — they want parents and youths to refocus and acquire proper movement skills beginning as early as kindergarten and progressing all the way through high school.

If it sounds like a throwback to gym class, it is. Those movements first emphasized in P.E. are the building blocks of high-performing athletes and the key to enjoying all sorts of recreational activities that encourage lifelong fitness, said Larry Meadors, a former national high school strength and conditioning coach with the National Association of Strength and Fitness and author of a paper urging “physical literacy” among youth.

Fundamentals

But yet, “For some ungodly reason we’ve skipped teaching fundamental movement,” Meadors said.

“We all learned the alphabet, and as we learned the alphabet we learned how to put two letters and then three and then four to form words, and pretty soon we had a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a book. And you should apply the same things for athletics.”

In an age where children have seemingly endless opportunities to play sports outside of school, all-around good movement is not always something Lay says he sees with seasoned middle and high school players. That particularly can be the case with specialized year-round, single sport athletes. Often he’ll see unbalanced movement, out of whack from years of kicking with one leg in soccer or pitching and throwing on a softball or baseball team.

Those physical fitness deficits can lead to injuries. That’s because the children do the same thing over and over again, and coaches and organizations can have little emphasis on proper training beyond a few sometimes misguided skills drills.

“Parents want their kids to be physically active, and sports is an option. So a lot of people think, if my kid is in a sport, that takes care of it,” Lay said. “Sport skills are great, but there has to also be some training in fundamental movements.”