Though we want our young people to enjoy healthy, active lives, it’s also important to recognise some young people are at risk of exercising “too much”.
Typically, the young people most at risk are young aspirational athletes who are involved in high volumes of programmed sport. Coaches, medical practitioners, and parents are increasingly recognising that overtraining and high levels of competition stress can produce negative outcomes for young people. Effective monitoring of training and competition loads in youth sport is crucial, especially for aspirational or highly motivated young athletes.
Below, we outline key considerations to help maximise the wellbeing of young people and minimise the chances of overtraining and injury. Effectively managing the training and competition load experienced by young people is crucial to helping them stay healthy and remain engaged in sport throughout their childhood and beyond.
Key considerations for parents
- Ensure young people take adequate rest and recovery periods on both a short-term and a long-term basis. This means taking at least one day off from organised sports per week and a 2-3 month break from each specific sport every year.
- Monitor increases in training load and advise young people that their training load — whether that’s total distance run, training time, repetitions, or some other metric — should not increase by more than 10% each week.
- Encourage young people not to feel pressure when participating in sports: remind them that the primary aims are to have fun, acquire skills, and practice good sportsmanship.
- Educate yourself in signs of an overuse injury or overtraining syndrome and open a dialogue with coaches about how to monitor for them.
- Teach young people to look for these signals, explain why it’s important, and encourage them to recognise signs of fatigue and adapt their training when necessary.
- Be observant for signs of reduced motivation, loss of enthusiasm, declining academic performance, and other indicators of burnout.
- Share your child’s training and competition schedule with their coaches, giving them a fuller understanding of your child’s workload and allowing them to adjust their demands accordingly.
- Share this advice with other parents and encourage a collective approach to monitoring training and competition load.
Key considerations for coaches
- Learn the full lists of sporting commitments of the young people you coach (in both school and outside sports clubs, including the sport you coach as well as other sports). Understand their precise training and competition demands and liaise with their other coaches in order to take a coordinated approach to workload and monitoring.
- Establish positive relationships and open lines of communication with children’s parents and find out the additional commitments that they have away from sport. This will enable you to take a holistic approach to coaching that doesn’t overburden them physiologically or psychologically.
- Use guidelines regarding training volumes as a signal (but not a target). As the number of hours someone spends training and competing each week approaches this level, be more vigilant for signs of overuse injury and overtraining syndrome.
- Pay close attention to the training and competition loads of everyone you coach, and encourage them to do the same. Build trust with the young people you work with so that they feel comfortable informing you when they identify signs of overtraining or feel that their workload is too high.
- Remember that all young people are different. An appropriate training load for one child might not be appropriate for another, even if they are in the same age group or have similar physical or technical attributes.
- Consider what activities might support rest and regeneration in your training sessions (for example, video or tactical sessions), and what tactics or rules you would put in place if you identified that a young athlete was fatigued.
- Coaches who share young athletes with other coaches can be susceptible to trying to ‘squeeze’ as much as they can into their limited contact time with players. This can create spikes in intensity and load. Be vigilant for this in your own coaching and be mindful not to do it.
- Don’t be afraid to be adaptable. If it appears that the training and competition load for a child is too high, change it.
