In-Season S&C for Junior Athletes: Five Dock

Round 6 is where the training plan usually falls apart

Most junior athletes do some kind of pre-season. Then the fixtures start, school sport gets added, rep trials appear in the middle of the season, and the gym work quietly disappears. In-season strength training for junior athletes is the part of the year that gets dropped first, usually right when the weekly running and collision load is at its highest.

At our Five Dock clinic we see a fairly predictable pattern in 13 to 18 year olds through winter. The strength qualities built over summer start drifting away by about week six or eight without maintenance work. At the same time, match minutes climb, sleep gets worse around exams, and the kid who was handling three sessions a week in February is now managing two games a weekend for two different teams.

In-season S&C is about holding onto what was built and keeping the athlete on the park, not chasing new personal bests.

What each sport is actually asking of them

Soccer. Repeated high-speed running with short recoveries, plus constant deceleration and change of direction. Wingers and fullbacks can rack up serious high-speed distance across a match. Hamstrings and adductors take the brunt, and the groin complaints that show up in June often trace back to a heavy May.

Rugby (league and union). Collision on top of running. Neck and shoulder strength matters for the tackle contest, and the trunk has to tolerate being loaded in awkward positions. Junior forwards often have decent gym numbers but poor tolerance to repeated ground contacts, which is a different quality.

AFL. The highest running volumes of the three, with a lot of one-legged work: kicking, leading, landing from a mark. Groin and hip loads accumulate quickly, and the kicking leg and standing leg develop very differently, which is worth measuring rather than assuming.

A generic gym program treats all three the same. It shouldn't.

Where the sessions fit in the week

The working principle is simple. Hard days stay hard, easy days stay easy, and gym work sits close to a training or game day rather than on the one day the athlete could actually rest.

For a typical soccer player with Tuesday and Thursday training and a Saturday game, one gym session on Tuesday after training and a shorter one on Thursday tends to work. For a rugby player carrying collision load, we often pull the volume back and keep the intensity, so two 30 to 40 minute sessions rather than two hour-long ones. For an AFL player already running 8 to 10km a match, we cut the conditioning entirely and spend the time on strength and single-leg work.

In-season maintenance can be less work than most parents expect. Two sessions a week, sometimes one during a congested block, is often enough to hold ground.

What a 1:1 session at Five Dock involves

Every session is one-to-one. We don't double-book, so the coach is watching every rep rather than running four kids at once and correcting the loudest problem. For a 14 year old learning to hinge or to decelerate properly, that supervision is the difference between the technique sticking and a bad pattern getting rehearsed 60 times.

A session in the Five Dock gym usually runs 45 to 60 minutes and covers a warm-up built around whatever came up in the assessment, a primary lower body strength lift, an upper body or trunk block, and then sport-specific work. For soccer that might be Nordic hamstring progressions and Copenhagen adductor variations. For rugby, isometric neck work and loaded carries. For AFL, single-leg landing and hip work on both sides.

We also talk to the athlete about their week. If they played 80 minutes on Saturday and have a rep trial Wednesday, the session changes on the spot.

Numbers instead of guesses

We use VALD ForceFrame to measure hip adductor and abductor strength, and AxIT force plates for jump and single-leg testing. For a junior athlete this gives a baseline in about 20 minutes: left versus right, push versus kick leg, and how those figures move across the season.

That matters more in adolescents than adults, because they're growing through it. A player who grows 6cm over a winter will change how they move, and a repeat test in July next to a March baseline tells you what actually shifted rather than what you think you saw.

We repeat testing at intervals through the season and adjust the program from what comes back.

Signs the load has got ahead of them

Worth booking an assessment if a young athlete is reporting knee or heel pain that shows up during games and settles by Monday, groin tightness that needs a longer warm-up each week, hamstring soreness after every sprint effort, or a general drop in speed and appetite for training late in the season. Growth-related complaints such as Osgood-Schlatter and Sever's are common in this age group and respond better to early load adjustment than to waiting for the season to end.

If your son or daughter is playing soccer, rugby or AFL through winter and the gym work has slipped, come in and get assessed at Five Dock so we can build the week around the fixtures they already have.

Read more about our youth services.

We go deeper on youth at sydneyathleticdevelopment.com.au.

If you would like it assessed at our Five Dock clinic, you can book an athletics strength & conditioning.