A growing teenager is not a small adult

Junior programmes hold load flat through a growth spurt, which is the one time it should bend most.

A fifteen year old grows eight centimetres between March and September and turns up to preseason with limbs that are not where he left them. The programme he is handed is the same one he did last year, with slightly bigger numbers, because the plan runs on the calendar rather than on him.

Coaches of junior athletes know that growth changes things. What they mostly do not do is change anything in response, partly because it is awkward to individualise inside a squad of twenty, and partly because a coach who reduces a young athlete's load has to explain that to a parent who thinks more is better.

Two things happen during a spurt that a coach can see without any equipment. Coordination gets worse, because the limb lengths that a movement pattern was tuned to have changed, and the athlete looks clumsier at skills they owned six months ago. And appetite goes strange, usually upwards but not always reliably, because a growing body has demands that a training plan never accounted for.

The appetite half is where coaching is at its worst. A teenager in a spurt who is also training six times a week is being asked to fund two projects at once, and the one that loses is usually training quality, then mood, then availability. Telling that athlete to eat more is not enough. They need to be told when, in a school day that offers about eleven minutes for lunch, and somebody has to look at whether there is food in the bag.

On the training side, I would use a growth phase as a reason to spend more time on technical work at low intensity and less on chasing loads. The athlete needs to relearn where their body ends. Grinding volume through a period of poor coordination is how you get repetitive complaints that everyone blames on bad luck.

Measure standing height every month. It takes two minutes for a whole squad, it costs nothing, and it turns a vague sense that somebody is going through a phase into a number that justifies changing their week.

The plan should follow the child. In most junior programmes the child follows the plan, and the plan was written for a different body.