Training for children and young people

Training methods are dependent on the age of the athletes, so coordination and technical training are highly prioritised, while strength training and cardio are low priorities for children.

Children are increasingly participating in intensive training programmes and demanding competitive sports that place high physical demands. In this context, it’s important that coaches (and parents) set realistic goals and limits so that children’s natural physical and mental development is not negatively affected.

Children’s trainability changes dramatically when puberty is reached and is predominantly hormonal.

Children’s developmental stages must be respected and attention must be paid to musculoskeletal symptoms that may indicate that the child’s performance limit has been exceeded.

It’s more important to find the balance between the load the body is exposed to and the strength of the loaded structures (muscles, tendons, bones).

All training must be within the pain threshold (soreness, disability, swelling). It is therefore necessary to reduce the intensity of exercise if it causes pain during exercise, pain in the evening after exercise or pain the day after exercise. It is important that the training is ramped up slowly without large jumps in training intensity so that the body can adapt to the new load.

Training children should be playful and should primarily include exercises for technique and coordination. Technical skills gained in youth are carried into adulthood.

Scientific studies with children have shown that rigorous physical training can be performed and lead to improvements in physical capacity, albeit to a significantly lesser degree than in adults. This applies to both aerobic and anaerobic capacity training. Thus, children do not gain much from cardio training as children’s oxygen uptake is not significantly improved by exercise.

Children don’t gain much from interval training and acid training either, as the enzyme systems that need to be trained are not optimally developed. However, the modest training gains that do occur do not follow the child into adulthood. It is an old superstition that a high level of fitness in adulthood must be established before or during puberty. When running training improves results measured in time, this is primarily due to better technique and not due to better oxygen uptake.

Strength training with unilateral or heavy loads should be avoided. Weight training with maximal or submaximal loads has no place in training programmes before puberty.

Children should be matched by height and weight as much as possible and not by age and gender, as is often practised. Boys and girls can train and compete together until boys‘ muscle mass makes up a larger percentage of their weight than girls’. At this point, mismatching will pose a significant injury risk for girls, for example in contact sports such as handball and football.

Children don’t have the same need for warming up and stretching before and after training as adults, but getting young athletes used to doing these exercises can have a certain pedagogical effect so that they become part of their ‘backbone’ as adults, where the exercises have a certain preventive value.

Generally speaking, training for children and young people should primarily involve technique and coordination and should be organised in a way that makes it fun and therefore motivating.

(Modified from ‘Fotbollsmedicin’ 1998 with permission of Jan Ekstrand and Jon Karlsson)