Canadian Sport for Life (CS4L) recognizes sport's contribution in Canadian society and its importance in everyone’s life. CS4L promotes each child’s healthy and logical development in a sport or physical activity as well as providing a model for athlete development.
 

A child’s desire to play a particular sport should always be the most important consideration when deciding to enroll him or her in a program. However children should be guided to try a variety of sports throughout the year and avoid focusing solely on one sport for more than one or two seasons (fall, winter, spring, summer) until the fundamental movement skills have been acquired.

For your convenience, to review a brief summary of how participants should be engaged in sport, click the image to the left.

Parents and care-givers should encourage pre-schools, schools, community recreation and sport organizations to offer quality physical activity programs. One way to do this is by asking appropriate questions. If you are wondering what a particular sport should or could be doing, check them out here. Parent checklists are available for schools, coaches and quality individual sport. If you want to rate your Provincial Sport Organization, there's a PSO scorecard for that! Lastly, but not least, True Sport has developed a matrix which identifies ethical literacy standards for all ages and stages of CS4L.

The Coaching Association of Canada has created “Long-Term Athlete Development Information for Parents” which provides an overview of  LTAD, describing each of the seven stages in easy-to-understand language. It gives solid and concrete advice on what parents can do to encourage their child’s current physical, and athletic development and suggests tips to help them assist their child as they move into the later stages of development. Summary articles on CS4L are also provided through the links below.

• Introduction to Long Term Athlete Development
• Developing Physical Literacy
• Learning to Train
• Training to Train
• Training to Compete
• Training to Win
• Active for Life
• Relative Age Effect
• Specialization
• Talent Identification
• Athletes with a Disability
• Female Athlete Perspective

For further information about appropriate sport involvement, and to understand what may be done to promote a child's best interests in staying active and healthy, we encourage you to visit www.canadiansportforlife.ca.

In 2007, XCZONE.TV reached out to a number of National Sports Organizations and the LTAD authors to combine efforts in creating an instructional product to help teach children. The LTAD core manuals provided the narrative and XCZONE.TV synchronized the video, to bring the concepts to life. To view this video, click here. We also encourage you to view these short golf, volleyball and hockey videos.