A parent watches a YouTube video at midnight, decides his eight-year-old needs a barbell programme, and prints the spreadsheet. By Saturday morning the programme is in the bin — and the household quietly switches to a multi-sport class run by a coach trained in the actual literature. Six months later the kid's broad jump is up thirty-five centimetres, his sprint time is half a second faster, and the thing he reports most consistently is that he likes turning up. That last variable is the strongest single predictor of whether he'll still be training in his twenties, his thirties, and his fifties.
Volume 31 of The Sequeira Library is about youth and adolescent training. Not adult programmes scaled down. Not the talent-pathway pressure cooker. The actual evidence base — what the literature says about strength training in children, when sport specialisation makes sense, what the Relative Age Effect does to selection decisions, and why the Long-Term Athletic Development framework points toward adults who train across their entire lives rather than burnt-out fifteen-year-olds.
Inside this one
- AAP position statement on youth resistance training (Stricker 2020) explained in plain language
- The Long-Term Athletic Development framework as the operational youth model
- Early sport specialisation evidence — injury, burnout, dropout, and the late-specialiser advantage
- Peak Height Velocity and what changes around it
- Female-youth specific considerations including RED-S and ACL prevention
- Age-bracket programming templates from ages six to seventeen
The standard it is held to
Every factual claim in this volume names its source, and every claim carries a confidence grade — settled, strong, emerging or contested. Where the evidence is thin, the text says so. How it’s made, in full → · What we’ve got wrong →