Workload monitoring in youth multi-sport – What do we actually know?

As the infrastructure of youth multi-sport continues to be refined and developed, it opens up more opportunities for youth athletes to take part in organised sports across multiple environments. Throughout a week, an individual could be involved in training and competitions that spans across school, club and academy teams. While many consider this to be a luxury to be able to be exposed to such a diverse range of competition and coaching, it also presents some underlying considerations that contribute to a wider challenge that requires careful planning from all stakeholders involved such as school coaches, academy coaches, administrators, sporting governing bodies, and most importantly, the youth athlete themselves. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) released a statement about the goal of youth athletic development in 2015, which was “to develop healthy, capable, resilient young athletes while attaining widespread enjoyable participation for all levels of athletic achievement” (1). Therefore, for stakeholders involved in the planning, organisation, and delivery of youth sport, this should always be at the forefront of what they do and how they implement it.

Since the organisation of a youth multi-sport athlete has to factor in different types of training sessions and competitions across a range of environments, there is a great need to ensure that the individual is not “underprepared” for competition demands or “overcooked” through an excessive exposure of training in a certain timeframe, which potentially leads to a maladaptive training response such as overtraining, overuse injuries, or even burnout (6). There have been guidelines developed in the past that promote suggestions to the organisation of training for youth athletes: don’t accumulate training hours per week that is greater than the age of the individual; always have at least 1 day off a week from training; and avoid doing more than 3 training sessions per day (3). This is crucial in keeping the youth athlete engaged and enjoyment levels high in their participation in sport. More specifically, there has been a recent surge in the workload monitoring of youth athletes, specifically training load. Training load (TL) is a term that quantifies the amount of work done from an individual (5). This can be quantified through external load – what an athlete does physically, for example the distance covered, sprints done in a training session; or internal load, an internal physiological or perceived response of the work done (5), for example the heart rate of the athlete, or a more commonly used tool which is session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE) (2). Load monitoring is extremely common in an elite sport setting where there is a capacity to use different techniques to monitor TL, both from an equipment and personnel point of view. Practitioners are able to utilise Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to track external load and collect sRPEs to create a meaningful representation of what athletes are doing daily, weekly, and monthly to inform their sessions. From a youth sport perspective, there are clear differences between them and the elite sport environment that make load monitoring more complicated, but potentially still just as important, if not more so to get a complete picture of all the training and competition they take part in.

Firstly, to truly get a representation of what a youth multi-sport athlete does, it is important to consider the different stakeholders and environments that are involved. Many adolescent athletes will take part in school, club, and academy sports teams that have varying schedules for training and competition with different focuses in their own domains (11). This creates the first issue of understanding the workload a youth athlete goes through as isolated planning from the separate stakeholders could result in a non-synchronised training schedule (8). As demonstrated by previous literature, the weekly schedule of an individual that takes part in multiple teams across different environments could be unintentionally overloading the individual through contrasting training elements, for example, having intense technical sessions and gym sessions scheduled the following two days after a school competition without enough time for recovery to take place. This could potentially lead to the maladaptive responses as mentioned above, which would negatively impact the multiple stakeholders as the youth athlete is unable to take part due to injury, but most importantly affect the youth athlete themselves, going against the IOC vision of youth athletic development (11). Prior planning involving the different coaches and the youth athlete themselves could be an easy way to mitigate this negative effect by organising and reshuffling different training sessions to allow optimal adaptation for the athlete through progressive overload without getting to a level that triggers a negative response to training. This has been outlined as an example for a youth team sport athlete playing school, club, and academy rugby (8), illustrating that with smarter planning, training sessions do not necessarily need to be cancelled, which poses to be less than ideal for both the athlete and the coach, but a manipulation of the session aim and content by placing open communication and the athlete’s health at the centre to create a healthy balance of training for the athlete (12).

Another aspect to consider is the intensity of the sessions and how they allow the multi-sport athlete to gain sufficient adaptation to improve without accumulating too much fatigue to affect their training. Scantlebury et al. (11) highlighted that the mismatch in the planned intensity of the session from the coach not corresponding to the perceived intensity of the athlete as another key point to address to better represent the workload monitoring of the youth athlete. As mentioned above, monitoring TL is generally an effective way to measure the intensity of the session through analysing different metrics. This allows coaches to make informed decisions about modifying sessions to suit the aim of the session. The issue that arises with the youth multi-sport athlete is that since their training spans across multiple environments with different coaches, it is extremely difficult for the coaches to be fully aware of the different training session intensities. Even if the youth athlete had access to GPS technology to monitor TL in one environment, it still leaves out monitoring in other settings, making it nearly impossible to get a complete picture of the overall TL for the individual. Previous research has suggested the use of sRPE in adolescent athletes as a more accessible way to monitor TL in youth athletes (9). The research demonstrated that a self-report within 24 hours of the completion of the training session yielded reliable and accurate readings of the intensity of the session, making this an easy load monitoring tool to administer. In reality however, the practicality of monitoring sRPE can also be affected by the validity of self-reported method (9). Considerations like will the youth athlete be diligent and proactive enough to log their load monitoring consistently creates a hidden problem, as practitioners may not always be there to record the sRPE from the individuals. In addition, the added factor of what youth athletes do outside of their training in their free time is another consideration that practitioners should bear in mind if they want a global representation of the overall training intensity throughout a week.

Finally, youth athletes also have the added factor of being a full-time student as well. This adds another dimension to their lives that many coaches tend to forget when planning training and competitions. Academic stressors such as exams and homework deadlines are other factors that could contribute to accumulated fatigue (4). Although this may not necessarily link with physical TL that youth athletes experience, it still creates a burden for the youth athlete if not managed well. Stakeholders should be aware of this “mental load” when doing long term planning to account for these periods of increased academic stress to ensure that the youth athlete is not fatigued holistically to allow them to avoid impairments in sporting performance (11).

Overall, workload monitoring in youth multi-sport athletes is a seemingly straightforward process, but in fact there are many considerations for the different coaches, stakeholders and the youth athlete themselves. Clear communication and collaborative planning of training schedules, training volume and intensity is crucial to ensure that the holistic development of the individual is at the forefront. Placing the athlete’s health and wellbeing as the “North Star” goal will allow decisions made by stakeholders to align with it. Therefore, this will hopefully increase the likelihood of the athlete enjoying themselves in sport, challenging themselves appropriately to improve their sporting performance, while maintaining a healthy and happy life academically and socially outside of sport.

References

1. Bergeron, M. F., Mountjoy, M., Armstrong, N., Chia, M., Côté, J., Emery, C. A., ... & Engebretsen, L. (2015). International Olympic Committee consensus statement on youth athletic development. British journal of sports medicine, 49(13), 843-851

2. Borg, G. (1998). Borg's perceived exertion and pain scales. Human kinetics.

3. Brenner, J. S. (2007). Overuse injuries, overtraining, and burnout in child and adolescent athletes. Pediatrics, 119(6), 1242-1245.

4. Cosh, S., & Tully, P. J. (2015). Stressors, coping, and support mechanisms for student athletes combining elite sport and tertiary education: Implications for practice. The Sport Psychologist, 29(2), 120-133.

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6. Matos, N. F., Winsley, R. J., & Williams, C. A. (2011). Prevalence of nonfunctional overreaching/overtraining in young English athletes. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 43(7), 1287-1294.

7. Murray, A. (2017). Managing the training load in adolescent athletes. International journal of sports physiology and performance, 12(s2), S2-42.

8. Phibbs, P. J., Jones, B., Roe, G. A., Read, D. B., Darrall-Jones, J., Weakley, J. J., & Till, K. (2017). We know they train, but what do they do? Implications for coaches working with adolescent rugby union players. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 12(2), 175-182.

9. Phibbs, P. J., Roe, G., Jones, B., Read, D. B., Weakley, J., Darrall-Jones, J., & Till, K. (2017). Validity of daily and weekly self-reported training load measures in adolescent athletes. Journal of strength and conditioning research, 31(4), 1121-1126

10. Scantlebury, S., Till, K., Sawczuk, T., Dalton-Barron, N., Phibbs, P., & Jones, B. (2020). The frequency and intensity of representative and non-representative late adolescent team-sport athletes’ training schedules. Journal of strength and conditioning research.

11. Scantlebury, S., Till, K., Sawczuk, T., Phibbs, P., & Jones, B. (2020). Navigating the complex pathway of youth athletic development: Challenges and solutions to managing the training load of youth team sport athletes. Strength & Conditioning Journal, 42(6), 100-108.

12. Till, K., & Baker, J. (2020). Challenges and [possible] solutions to optimizing talent identification and development in sport. Frontiers in psychology, 11.

13. Towlson, C., Salter, J., Ade, J. D., Enright, K., Harper, L. D., Page, R. M., & Malone, J. J. (2020). Maturity-associated considerations for training load, injury risk, and physical performance within youth soccer: One size does not fit all. Journal of Sport and Health Science.