What "strength training" even means changes completely by age. The principle is the same everywhere — own the movement, then load it — but the application looks completely different across the three chapters below: the playground years, the growth years, and the young-adult years.
Match the load to the age and the movement — not to the kid's ambition, or the parent's.
~5–12 — the playground years
Bodyweight, crawls, jumps, hangs, med-ball tosses, play. Coordination and movement literacy, not size. The playground is the weight room at this age, and it's a great one — the games are the program.
~13–15 — the growth years
Bodies change fast here, and no two on the same schedule — this is where the gaps between kids are widest, and where the kid who looks "behind" is often just later on the same curve. Real, supervised, technique-first resistance training belongs here, light and progressive — the evidence says it's safe and beneficial at this stage. So do plyometrics and higher-level conditioning — not as a second program, but woven into what already exists: bounds and jumps inside the warm-up, sprint work inside the games. It's fluid — part of practice, not an addition to it. Movement quality leads the bar, and a body that's growing an inch a semester deserves patience while it re-learns its own levers.
~16–18 — the young-adult years
By sixteen most players are close to the size they're going to be, and they can genuinely handle more: real progressive training, strength as a true lever, capacity built on the movement base the earlier years laid down. Ownership shifts too — the training starts belonging to the athlete, not the adults. And training is itself load: when something new gets introduced, everything around it lightens where it can. Quality over quantity while it's new. If you fail, it's the edge doing its job — learning where it is, safely, is the rep.
Through all three: the barbell is neither the enemy nor the goal. It's a tool that becomes appropriate at the right time, loaded lightly and coached well. The progression is bodyweight → light implements → supervised barbell, gated by movement quality at every step — and supervision plus technique are the real safety levers, far more than the tool itself:
How it shows up
- The playground years build the athlete the weight room will later load.
- Technique gates every progression — the movement earns the weight.
- A teen's max is never worth how they move. Build capacity, keep the pattern.