S&C for Young Soccer, Rugby & AFL Players: Five Dock

The three sports don't ask the same things of a teenage body

Youth strength and conditioning for soccer, rugby and AFL gets lumped together as "footy training", and then every kid gets the same squat, bench and shuttle runs. The demands are different enough that the programs should look different too.

A junior soccer player covers a lot of ground at moderate speed with repeated short accelerations, cuts and decelerations, plus a kicking leg that does far more work than the other. Groin and hip loads are high and constant. A rugby league or union player deals with collision on top of acceleration — tackling, wrestling, getting up off the ground and doing it again. Neck, shoulder, trunk and hip strength matter for absorbing contact, and the sprint distances are short and repeated. An AFL player runs more total distance than either, changes direction while running, kicks off both sides, and lands on one leg constantly. Hamstrings, groin and calf take a beating across a long season.

A 15-year-old playing two of these sports across summer and winter is stacking those demands with very little planned recovery between them.

Growth changes the picture

Between roughly 12 and 16, bones lengthen faster than muscles and tendons adapt to the new lever lengths. Coordination that was fine last season can go missing for a few months. This is the window where Osgood-Schlatter's at the knee, Sever's at the heel and various apophyseal irritations at the hip and pelvis show up, usually in the kids doing the most running and jumping across the most teams.

That doesn't mean pulling back from training. It means knowing where a young athlete sits relative to their growth spurt and adjusting what you load and how quickly. A player who has grown 8cm in a year needs a different sprint and jump volume than a teammate who has finished growing. We take height and sitting height measurements to estimate maturity status, and revisit them, because a program written in March may not suit the same athlete in September.

Testing before programming

Guessing at a teenager's strengths wastes their limited training time. At our Five Dock clinic we use VALD ForceFrame and AxIT force plates to get numbers on paper before writing anything.

The ForceFrame measures hip adduction and abduction strength, which is directly relevant to groin load in soccer and AFL, and lets us compare left to right. It also picks up knee flexion and shoulder strength, useful for the rugby players. The AxIT plates give us countermovement jump height, how the athlete produces and absorbs force, and single-leg landing asymmetry — the sort of side-to-side difference a young player will happily hide from a coach's eye but not from a force plate.

We also look at basic movement competency. Can they hinge? Can they hold a single-leg squat without the knee collapsing in? Can they decelerate from a run and stop under control? Plenty of talented juniors have never been taught the second one.

What a 1:1 session looks like

Sessions run one-to-one with a coach, no double-booking, in the gym space at Five Dock. A typical hour for a 14 to 17 year old footballer includes a warm-up that doubles as skill work — sprint mechanics, cutting technique, landing drills — then a strength block built around a squat pattern, a hinge, a push, a pull and something unilateral. Loads are progressed on technique first and weight second.

Sport-specific work sits on top of that. Soccer players usually get more Copenhagen and adductor work, plus deceleration drills. Rugby players get more neck and upper back work, isometric holds, and short repeated sprints with contact-relevant positions. AFL players get more hamstring eccentric work, running volume management and repeated single-leg landing exposure, because that's what their game asks for.

We write it around the club schedule, not against it. If a player has Tuesday and Thursday team training plus a Saturday game, hard gym work goes early in the week. Two well-placed sessions beat four that leave them flat for selection.

Barbells and 13-year-olds

Supervised resistance training in adolescents has a well-documented safety record in the strength and conditioning literature, including position statements from the National Strength and Conditioning Association. The risk in youth sport sits with unsupervised load, poor technique under fatigue, and playing 60 games a year across three clubs — not with a properly coached deadlift.

What we do insist on is that the athlete can demonstrate the pattern with body weight or a dowel before it gets loaded, and that they can tell us how a session felt afterwards.

When to get assessed

Book a look if a young player has knee or heel pain that's been hanging around for more than two or three weeks, if they're limping after games, if they've had two hamstring or groin strains in a season, or if they're coming back from an injury and nobody has actually tested whether the injured side matches the other one. Pre-season is the other sensible time, before the running volume jumps.

If you'd like your junior soccer, rugby or AFL player assessed and set up with a program that fits their sport and their stage of growth, our team at Five Dock can take them through it.

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.