Well meant is not well trained —
supporting teenage athletes.

The pattern keeps coming back, and it looks almost identical every time. A sixteen-year-old, talented, highly motivated. Club training four times a week, plus strength work at the gym, school sport, competition at the weekend. On top of that a nutrition plan recommended by a professional on Instagram, and three tubs from the supplement shop.

The parents are not doing anything wrong in the sense of being careless. Quite the opposite. They drive, they pay, they organise, they read up. That is exactly the point: the commitment is there, the steering is missing. Each coach only sees their own slice of the week. Nobody sees the whole pile.

And then comes the sentence I have heard so often that I could say it along: he has had knee pain for a few months now, but it keeps going away. None of what follows is an accusation aimed at parents. It is what I tell them in this situation.

Too much of the right thing: load and capacity during growth

A training stimulus is never good or bad on its own. It always works in relation to what the body can currently carry. In an adult, that capacity stays fairly stable over months. In a fourteen-year-old, it does not.

During the pubertal growth spurt, known in sport science as peak height velocity, bone grows faster than tendons and muscles can follow. Leverage changes within a few months, coordination suffers temporarily, and the tendon attachments at the growth plates become the weakest link in the chain. That is why this phase brings exactly the complaints parents recognise: pain below the kneecap, at the heel, at the pelvic rim, in the lower back.

None of this is a reason to stop training. It is a reason to look more closely than usual. The body tolerates less during twelve months of growth than it did in the twelve months before, even though the teenager subjectively feels stronger.

Then there is the volume problem. In 2016 the American Academy of Pediatrics compiled two reference points: no more hours of organised sport per week than years of age, and no more than 16 hours per week in total. The academy explicitly notes that these rules of thumb still need better validation. As a rough measure they are useful anyway, because most parents are surprised by how many hours actually add up once they count honestly.

Two further recommendations from the same statement are more concrete and easier to apply: one to two days per week completely free of the main sport, and across the year roughly three months away from it, in blocks of about one month each. Not the couch, something else. Swimming, climbing or cycling during that time costs nothing.

Early specialisation: the picture is less clear-cut than it is usually presented

The common warning is that early specialisation causes harm. That is too short. What the data mainly show is a volume problem: teenagers with very high volume in a single sport and little free play sustain more overuse injuries. Whether the specialisation itself does the damage or the hours that come with it is hard to separate in most studies, because they were collected retrospectively.

There is a second argument that tends to get lost in the debate: the hit rate of early selection is poor. The same statement cites an analysis of German Olympic sports in which only 0.3 per cent of the athletes selected at the youngest level later ranked internationally. Steering a twelve-year-old towards a career means taking a decision with bad odds and high costs.

In practice this does not mean a favourite sport should be banned. It means the risk lies in year-round identical load without a break, not in the enthusiasm for one sport.

Strength training is part of the solution here

One misunderstanding is persistent: that strength training harms growth. The 2014 international consensus says the opposite. Supervised strength training with age-appropriate technique is safe for children and adolescents, improves motor skills and lowers injury risk in sport. The growth plates take no damage as long as technique is sound and load follows competence.

What actually causes harm is unsupervised maximal lifting copied from videos online. The variable is the quality of instruction, not the weight itself. How excessive load builds up over weeks and how to spot it early is covered in detail under recognising overtraining.

The most common nutrition mistake is too little, not the wrong kind

When parents ask me about nutrition, it is usually about details: meal timing, carbohydrates in the evening, the right breakfast. The bottleneck is almost never there. It is in the total amount.

A teenager in competitive sport has two energy consumers at the same time: training and their own growth. If energy is not sufficient for both, the body saves where it does not show up immediately. Bone formation, hormone production and the immune system are throttled long before competition performance drops.

That is exactly what the 2023 IOC consensus statement on REDs, relative energy deficiency in sport, describes. The consequences range from bone health through the hormonal and immune systems to mood and performance. In adolescents this weighs heavier than in adults, because most bone density is built in exactly these years. What is not laid down then can barely be recovered later.

This is made worse by eating patterns designed for adults. Intermittent fasting, strict low-carb approaches and rigid clean eating may work well for a forty-year-old with a desk job. In a fifteen-year-old with ten training hours a week they reliably create a gap. Fasting also collides with training times that are already squeezed between school and the evening.

Protein works the same way. It matters, but in most teenage athletes it is not the limiting factor. Raising the protein share while cutting carbohydrates only moves the real problem somewhere else.

Weight pressure in sports with weight classes or aesthetic judging is a topic of its own. Comments about the body come early there, often in passing, and they stick. The risk of disordered eating is elevated in these disciplines. That is no reason for panic, but it is a reason for a clear boundary: weight topics in minors do not belong in the hands of parents or coaches alone, they need medical supervision.

Supplements: food first, and a risk few people know about

In adolescents, food first is not a matter of attitude but the rule. The reason is simple: if the basics are not in place, a tub of powder only hides the fact that not enough is being eaten. In most cases the most effective supplement in youth sport is a second dinner.

There is also a risk that few parents have on their radar. Legally, dietary supplements are foods, not medicines. Nobody checks the contents before they are sold. An international study by the German Sport University Cologne bought 634 products in 13 countries and found anabolic steroids that were not on the label in 94 of them, that is 14.8 per cent.

For a teenager in drug-tested competition that means a product ordered online can produce a positive test even though nobody intended anything prohibited. Anyone unwilling to drop supplements entirely should stick to products that are systematically screened for doping substances, for example through the Cologne List. That lowers the risk considerably, though nobody brings it to zero.

Caffeine deserves its own paragraph, because it is the most widely consumed substance in this age group, usually as energy drinks. Before a competition it feels like performance. The bill arrives in the evening, when falling asleep does not work. In teenagers, restlessness and a racing heart appear more easily than in adults, because body weight and habituation are lower. The American Academy of Pediatrics considers energy drinks fundamentally inappropriate for children and adolescents.

There are situations in which supplementation makes sense, a confirmed iron or vitamin D deficiency for instance. The order is always the same, though: medical assessment, test result, then targeted and time-limited use. Not the other way round. The general risks of supplementation are covered under dietary supplements and their risks.

Sleep is the training tool that costs nothing

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends 8 to 10 hours per night on a regular basis for 13- to 18-year-olds. Teenagers in competitive sport sit below that almost without exception, and for structural reasons rather than laziness.

During puberty the internal clock shifts later. A fifteen-year-old lying awake at 10 p.m. is not undisciplined, they are biologically normal. The problem arises at the other end: the school day does not shift with them. If evening training only finishes at 9 p.m. and homework and the phone follow, eight hours simply do not fit into the night.

There is also a thinking error running through almost every training plan: school, training and competition are treated as three separate topics. The body does not make that distinction. An exam period is a loading period, even though it appears in no training plan. Leaving the training volume untouched in the week before exams raises total load without anyone noticing.

What parents can steer here is more than they often think. Question training times where an alternative exists. Devices out of the bedroom, not as punishment but as a house rule for everyone. And discuss exam weeks with the coach in advance, rather than explaining afterwards why performance dropped. The mechanics behind this are described under improving recovery and sleep quality.

Support, do not optimise

The most effective role for parents is unspectacular. It does not consist of being the better coach, but of being the only person who sees the whole picture.

When three coaches each steer their own part, nobody steers the sum. A simple calendar holding every session of the week, including school sport and self-directed training, is often the first real moment of clarity. More often than not it shows two to three hours more than anyone had in mind.

The second lever is the kind of conversations you have. The drive home after a competition is not a video analysis. Ask about the feeling, not the result. The sentence that carries the most weight here is an unremarkable one: I enjoy watching you. It makes clear that attention does not hang on performance. That is precisely the point where pressure and motivation part ways.

The third lever is how pain is handled. In many clubs, pushing through still counts as a question of character. For a growing body that is risky, because overuse damage at the growth plates develops gradually and stays quiet for a long time. Recurring pain in the same place is information, not a test.

The last point in particular is often dismissed as a normal side effect of sport. It is not. An absent period in a young female athlete is one of the clearest signs of an energy deficit and belongs in medical hands.

Where exactly the gap sits in an individual case cannot be judged from a distance. The route there is always the same, though: look at training history, sleep, nutrition and test results together instead of turning one screw. That is the framework of a structured assessment, and with teenagers it sensibly happens with parent and child together.