Strength first
Strength is the foundation quality because it raises the ceiling on everything else. A stronger athlete accelerates harder, changes direction more sharply, absorbs landings more safely and tolerates more weekly load before tissue complains.
For young athletes, strength development is mostly about consistency: two sessions a week, sustained across a year, produces a transformation that any six-week block cannot.
Then speed
The most common mistake in youth sport is training speed at the end of a session when the athlete is tired. That trains fatigue tolerance, not speed, and adds injury risk without the benefit.
- Sprint at genuinely maximum effort, sub-maximal running does not develop speed.
- Keep volume tiny: 6–10 short sprints of 10–30 metres is a full session.
- Always train speed when fresh, at the start of a session.
- Include acceleration, top speed and change of direction as separate qualities.
- Full recovery between reps, 1–3 minutes is normal.
Then resilience
Resilience is the capacity to absorb force repeatedly without breaking down. It comes from graded exposure: landings, hops, decelerations and change of direction performed deliberately, in controlled doses, so the tissue adapts.
Athletes who are protected from impact do not become resilient - they become deconditioned to it, and then meet it unprepared in a match. The aim is to get the exposure in a planned way rather than accidentally.
The building blocks in practice
- Squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, the movement foundations.
- Single-leg strength and control, which mirrors what sport actually asks for.
- Calf and Achilles capacity, hugely underdone in most youth programmes.
- Landing mechanics: two-foot, one-foot, forwards, sideways, from height, with rotation.
- Trunk control: anti-rotation and anti-extension over sit-ups.
- Jumping and bounding, progressed from low to high intensity over months.
Tracking progress
Simple field tests, repeated every 8–12 weeks, are enough: a standing broad jump, a single-leg hop for distance on each side, a timed 10-metre sprint, a maximum set of single-leg calf raises. They take fifteen minutes and give a young athlete something concrete to chase.
Between-side differences matter as much as absolute numbers. A hop distance more than about 10% better on one side flags an imbalance worth addressing.
The long game
The athletes who arrive at 18 strong, fast and durable are rarely the ones who did the most in any given year. They are the ones who did something useful every year - a couple of strength sessions a week, some sprinting, some jumping, varied sport, decent sleep, without long interruptions from injury or burnout.