The Key Principles You Must Understand About Planning for Youth Athletes
When I first started coaching, I wasn’t entirely sure if I was planning a training season... or just throwing my athletes into a well-organised guessing game. I’d read about periodisation models designed for Olympic weightlifters in the 70s—then somehow found myself trying to apply them to 14-year-old triple jumpers with wildly inconsistent homework schedules and growth spurts that made their knees creak louder than mine. At some point, I had to ask: Do I actually understand what I need to understand to plan effectively for youth athletics?
If you've ever felt the same—half-confident, half-confused, and entirely outnumbered by acronyms—this article’s for you. We’ll break down the key principles you need to plan an effective season for youth athletes, help you test whether you’ve really grasped them, and (because no coach should have to wing it), and if you do need more support, point you to free courses on the Athletics Learning Centre that can sharpen your planning toolkit for next season.
Training Principles
To plan effectively for youth athletics, coaches need to understand how to structure training across weeks and months in a way that supports steady development—not just short-term success. Early on, it’s easy to feel like a genius coach. Give a young athlete almost any training stimulus—more reps, longer runs, faster sprints—and they’ll improve. These are what we call “beginner gains,” and they can be misleading. But once the novelty wears off, simply doing more stops working, and doing better becomes essential. That’s where the principles of training and periodisation come in.
Effective long-term planning is built on the foundational principles including:
Progressive overload (increasing challenge over time),
Specificity (targeting the right capacities for the event),
Variety (to keep adaptation rolling and reduce monotony),
Planned recovery (because adaptation doesn’t happen in the grind—it happens in the gaps), and
Individualisation (if coaching was just a ‘copy-paste’ process, a computer could do it).
Are these new principles for you or feel like you haven’t quite grasped these concepts? No worries! Get started or refresh your knowledge with the Development Coach Core Modules on the Athletics Learning Centre (Australian Athletics Membership Required)
Periodisation
A well-designed periodised program sequences training blocks—such as mesocycles (3–6 week phases focused on specific goals) and macrocycles (larger season-long frameworks)—to guide athletes through phases of building, refining, and tapering. This approach allows athletes to steadily develop their physical and technical capacities while minimising injury risk and ensuring they’re ready to peak at their key competitions. Without this structure, training becomes guesswork. With it, you create a roadmap that meets athletes where they are, and gets them where they want to go—faster, stronger, and better prepared.
Training Principles and Periodization: Self-Review
Tick each box if you feel confident in your understanding or if you applied the principle last season.
| Do I understand the theory? | Did I apply the theory last season? |
|---|---|
Are these new principles for you or feel like you haven’t quite grasped these concepts? No worries! Get started or refresh your knowledge with the Development Coach Core Modules on the Athletics Learning Centre (Australian Athletics Membership Required)
Athlete Monitoring and Load Management
Planning is only as effective as your ability to adapt it—and that’s where athlete monitoring comes in. As a coach, your job isn’t just to deliver sessions, but to listen to how athletes are responding to them. That means keeping tabs not only on what’s written in the training plan, but how the athlete is coping with it—physically, emotionally, and developmentally.
At its core, monitoring and load management is about tracking how much work is being done (volume, intensity, frequency), and how well the athlete is absorbing it. It helps you stay ahead of potential problems like fatigue, injury, and burnout—common risks in youth sport when training stress outpaces recovery. The goal isn’t to work them harder, but to adapt them better.
Simple tools like session RPE (Rating of Perceived Exertion), weekly wellness check-ins, or even a quick “how are you feeling today?” can be powerful. When paired with objective markers like fitness tests, performance trends, or recovery times, you start to get a much clearer picture of how each athlete is travelling.
Importantly, coaches must also monitor growth and maturation. During periods of rapid growth—like the infamous “awkward” phase around peak height velocity—athletes often experience temporary dips in coordination, speed, or skill execution. Rather than pushing through, smart coaches adapt: pulling back intensity, switching the focus to technique, or prioritising mobility and control until things stabilise.
The Fitness-Fatigue Model
The Fitness-Fatigue model explains how training affects performance by balancing two opposing forces: fitness and fatigue. When you train, your body experiences fatigue, which temporarily lowers your performance. At the same time, fitness improves more gradually as your body adapts to the training. Initially, the negative effects of fatigue outweigh the gains in fitness, so performance may dip. However, as you recover, fatigue decreases while fitness remains elevated, leading to a rebound in performance known as supercompensation, where your performance temporarily rises above its original level. This is the ideal window to train again, as it allows for continued improvement. If you train again too soon or neglect recovery, fatigue accumulates and progress stalls; if you wait too long, the supercompensation effect fades. The key to long-term progress is timing your training and recovery to take advantage of supercompensation while managing fatigue.
The Fitness-Fatigue Model explains how every training session produces both a positive fitness gain and a temporary fatigue cost. Your performance on any given day is the net result of these two forces:
Performance = Fitness – Fatigue
The art of planning is managing both sides of the equation.
How Monitoring and Load Management Looks like in Reality
In the real world, this might look as simple as keeping a short training journal for each athlete—or asking them to log how they felt after each session. A quick mood check or a “traffic light” self-rating can flag when something’s off. If a 15-year-old 800m runner starts reporting heavy legs and performance stagnation, that’s your cue to drop the intensity, add recovery days, or modify upcoming sessions.
Growth tracking matters too. Measure height every few months, look for changes in posture or coordination, and don’t be afraid to dial back plyometrics or technical complexity if the athlete’s body is going through a growth spurt. Swap bounding for low-impact drills, replace volume with skill work, and come back to higher loads when they’ve re-established control.
Ultimately, the best youth coaches don't rigidly follow a plan—they respond to it. They plan, observe, assess, and adjust. That feedback loop is the secret sauce to effective long-term development.
Athlete Monitoring & Load Management: Self-Review
Tick each box if you understand the principle or applied it in practice last season.
| Do I understand the theory? | Did I apply the theory last season? |
|---|---|
Are these new principles for you or feel like you haven’t quite grasped these concepts? No worries! Get started or refresh your knowledge with the Loading, Adaptation, and Recovery course on the Athletics Learning Centre (Australian Athletics Membership Required)
Long Term Athlete Development
One of the most important principles in youth coaching is recognising that young athletes are not simply smaller versions of adults. They’re growing, learning, and adapting—often all at once—so our planning must reflect that. This is where Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) comes into play.
There are several LTAD models floating around (like Balyi’s framework or the Youth Physical Development model), each with helpful age-specific guidelines. But there’s no single perfect blueprint. What they do agree on is this: developing athletic excellence takes time. Years, not months. And definitely not quick-fix programs or crash training plans.
Take the famous “10,000-hour rule”—the idea that elite performance comes from 10 years of deliberate practice. It sounds neat, but the evidence doesn’t back it as a hard rule. In reality, every athlete’s path is different. What matters more is consistent, developmentally appropriate training that meets the athlete where they are—not where we wish they were.
A key conversation here is the specialisation vs. diversification debate. It’s tempting to focus a talented young athlete on one event early—especially when medals and state teams are on the line. But the research is clear: early specialisation can increase the risk of overuse injuries and burnout, and it’s not a prerequisite for elite performance later on. In fact, athletes who sample a variety of events or sports tend to develop more well-rounded motor skills, better movement capacity, and a more robust athletic base.
For coaches, this means encouraging exploration, delaying specialisation, and gradually increasing competition frequency. In the early stages, the training-to-competition ratio should favour learning and development over chasing results. Season plans should align with the athlete’s maturity—physical, technical, and emotional—not just their age group.
A long-term mindset doesn’t just build better athletes. It builds athletes who stay in the sport, love what they do, and peak when it matters most.
What does an Understanding of Long Term Athlete Development Look Like?
In practice, applying the principles means coaching with the long game in mind. Rather than designing a U13 season like a slightly easier version of an elite’s, we should prioritise age-appropriate training adaptations —refining technique, building coordination, and developing general conditioning. We should resist the urge to fast-track talent into a single event and instead give young athletes the chance to explore multiple disciplines or even other sports. As they grow, we should progressively increase training load, introduce more targeted competition, and stay patient with performance expectations.
Crucially, we coach the athlete in front of us—not just the age on their entry form. Two 14-year-olds might need entirely different approaches depending on where they are in their development. When we align planning with biological maturity and not just competition calendars, we build athletes who are more resilient, more versatile, and more likely to reach their peak when it counts.
Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD): Self-Review
Tick each box if you understand the principle or applied it in practice last season.
| Do I understand the theory? | Did I apply the theory last season? |
|---|---|
Are these new principles for you or feel like you haven’t quite grasped these concepts? No worries! Get started or refresh your knowledge with the Development Coach Core Modules on the Athletics Learning Centre (Australian Athletics Membership Required)
