Youth Training

Why You Should Still Lift During the Season We put in so much work in the off season, then lose a lot of those adaptations when we stop training during the season. And with youth sports, kids are playing ALL the time. Is there truly ever an off season for them? Everything has its own context but in general let’s look at the following 3 graphs to help explain what your training should look like in season versus off season and why I still strongly encourage you to lift during s

“Sport-specific training” gets overused. You’ll hear things like: “If it doesn’t look like the sport, it’s not useful.” “My kid plays soccer, they should train like soccer players.” “We need to make the gym more game-like.” But trying to mimic your sport in the weight room is not the goal. The most sport-specific thing you can do is play your sport. What actually builds performance The weight room exists to build the foundation that allows you to express skill better, strengt

One of the biggest mistakes athletes make during the return-to-sport process is thinking they need to immediately “grind” their way back into shape. More conditioning. More intensity. More soreness. More exhaustion. But getting tired and getting better are not the same thing. Working Out vs. Training “Working out gets you tired. Smart training gets you better.” There’s a difference between exercising and actually training with purpose. Training with purpose takes more discipl

ACL injuries are often discussed as if they’re random or unavoidable. But when you look at the research, patterns emerge. Female athletes experience ACL injuries at significantly higher rates than males. Depending on the study, this difference is commonly reported as approximately 2–8 times higher risk (Arendt & Dick, 1995; Agel et al., 2005). The important question is not if the risk exists, but why. The answer is not one factor. It is a combination of anatomy, hormonal infl

The benefits and common misconceptions about youth strength training