Once a young athlete’s season starts, the calendar changes fast. Two or three practices. Games. School. Homework. Travel. Sometimes another team layered on top. As parents, we look at that schedule and reasonably ask whether strength training still belongs in the week. Or at least I do haha. But I'm a strength coach....

For most, the answer is usually yes, but the program should change. In-season training is not the time to chase the biggest training volume of the year. The goal is to preserve useful physical qualities, keep developing where appropriate and avoid creating fatigue that competes with practices and games.

That requires more than simply copying the off-season workout and doing fewer sets. It requires looking at the athlete’s entire week.

Sport practice does not replace every part of physical preparation

Playing the sport is obviously the priority during the season. Practice develops skill, tactics, decision-making and conditioning specific to competition. But practice does not automatically maintain every strength quality an athlete developed in the off-season.

Resistance training has consistently been shown to improve physical performance in youth athletes. A systematic review and meta-analysis by Lesinski and colleagues found moderate effects on muscular strength and vertical-jump performance and smaller improvements in sprint, agility and sport-specific performance. A more recent 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis also found that supervised strength training improved multiple measures of physical fitness in children and adolescents.

Those benefits come from a training stimulus. When that stimulus disappears for long periods, we should not assume sport alone will replace it perfectly.

The in-season question is dose, not just yes or no

The amount of training an athlete needs depends on the sport, age, training history, position, playing time and schedule. A starting point for many youth athletes is one or two focused strength sessions per week. Some weeks may allow more. Tournament weeks may call for less.

The useful part is that strength training does not have to be packed into huge sessions. A systematic review and meta-analysis on resistance-training frequency in well-trained athletes found no clear advantage to higher frequency when training volume was accounted for and discussed the practical use of distributing strength work across shorter sessions during congested in-season schedules. That review was not specific to children, so we should not copy the exact prescription into youth training. The practical lesson is still helpful: strength work can be organized around competition instead of being treated as all-or-nothing.

At BFP, that may mean trimming accessory work, keeping a few important lifts, reducing total sets, or changing the session after a hard game. The goal is to provide enough training to be useful without pretending the weight room exists in isolation.

What should change during the season?

In-season sessions should usually become more precise.

• Keep the important patterns: squat, hinge, push, pull, carry, brace and appropriate single-leg work.

• Maintain meaningful resistance instead of turning every lift into very light conditioning.

• Reduce unnecessary volume when practices and games are high.

• Place demanding lower-body work away from important competition when possible.

• Keep speed and power work high quality, with enough rest to actually move fast.

• Adjust for soreness, growth spurts, travel and playing time.

Two athletes on the same team may need different weeks. A starter who played an entire tournament weekend is dealing with a very different workload from a teammate who played limited minutes. A good program should notice that.

Strength is something we want to carry through the season

There is also a long-term development reason to keep strength training in the picture. Youth athletes are not only preparing for this Saturday. They are building a physical foundation for future seasons.

The Lesinski meta-analysis found larger strength effects in longer training periods, which supports the idea that strength development is a long-term project rather than a short preseason burst. The program will change throughout the year, but disappearing from the weight room every time games start can make that long-term process unnecessarily stop-and-start.

We also need to be clear about what the research does not say. An athlete is not guaranteed to get injured because they stop lifting. Injury risk is influenced by previous injury, exposure, workload, sleep, contact, growth, sport demands and many other factors. Strength training is one piece of preparation, not an insurance policy.

Make the program fit the athlete’s season

Parents can also watch for signs that the total weekly load is getting too high. A sudden drop in energy, unusual soreness that does not resolve, declining enthusiasm, trouble sleeping or consistently poor performance may be reasons to look at the whole schedule. The answer is not always to remove strength training first. Sometimes the bigger issue is an extra practice, a second team, a tournament-heavy month or simply too little recovery. Good programming requires seeing all of it together. A short conversation with the athlete can also reveal information the calendar cannot. Ask how the legs feel, whether practice intensity changed, how much they played and whether school stress is unusually high. The weekly plan should respond to the actual athlete, not just the printed schedule.

The best in-season plan is often the one that looks almost boring on paper. Enough strength work to maintain or gradually improve. Enough speed exposure to keep quality high. Enough flexibility to back off when the sport schedule spikes.

For families in Hampstead and Surf City, we recently added Tuesday and Thursday 6:15 PM youth sessions specifically because school-year schedules get crowded. New youth athletes still complete Foundations first so we can teach the movements and understand where they are starting.

If your athlete is practicing and competing three, four or five days per week, adding more work for the sake of work is not the goal. The goal is to keep building the athlete while respecting the season they are already in.

Works Cited

• Lesinski, Melanie, Olaf Prieske, and Urs Granacher. “Effects and Dose-Response Relationships of Resistance Training on Physical Performance in Youth Athletes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” British Journal of Sports Medicine, vol. 50, no. 13, 2016, pp. 781–795. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2015-095497. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26851290/.

• Moreno-Torres, José M., et al. “Effects of Supervised Strength Training on Physical Fitness in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology, vol. 10, no. 2, 2025, article 162. https://doi.org/10.3390/jfmk10020162. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40407446/.

• Cuthbert, Matthew, et al. “Effects of Variations in Resistance Training Frequency on Strength Development in Well-Trained Populations and Implications for In-Season Athlete Training: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Sports Medicine, vol. 51, no. 9, 2021, pp. 1967–1982. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01460-7. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33886099/.