22 Oct Youth Female Athlete Strength and Speed Training: STOP Doing Random, Cookie Cutter Circuits
Imagine you have a doctor’s appointment coming up.
You’re given no intake form to fill out.
You know, the form before your doctor’s visit that asks about your age, symptoms, current medications, medical history, and what you’re currently struggling with.
So you show up to the doctor and they know nothing about you.
The doctor comes into the room. He gives you a diagnosis and prescribes a bunch of random medications that have nothing to do with your condition.
You’re pissed that the appointment wasn’t personalized to you. And you’re worried about the health risks of the random medications he prescribed.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but this same thing is happening to your female athlete in her strength and speed development.
Most Workouts Are Random and Cookie Cutter
Go to any youth sports club, and the club wide speed coach is putting girls through a circuit with no rhyme or reason.
Here’s how it usually goes:
5 minutes before the team shows up, the club’s “speed coach” writes a workout on the white board:
No thought behind it. No purpose. No learning objectives. No speed or strength adaptation. Just random, bs workouts that do nothing but make girls sweat and get their heart rates up.
Worse yet, the “speed coach” is running this nonsense circuit for 15+ girls, they’re all doing different things at once, which makes it impossible for the coach to actually monitor and teach technique properly.
Lastly, there’s no individualization within a circuit. Everyone’s doing the same reps and loads. What about the girls who are beginners who need to slow down and learn technique with body weight first? And what about the girls who are more advanced, with higher training ages, who can load heavier on the strength movements?
When a coach does random, girls chase too many rabbits and end up catching none. They don’t get speed and strength results that transfer to the field. And they plateau or get worse.
Random circuits are far, far from true speed and strength training.
What Female Athletes Need (and Deserve!)
True speed and strength training for youth female athletes must follow the key principles of training and getting results: individualization, specificity, and progressive overload.
As an example, I might be training a group of 15-year-old girls in my gym, but that doesn’t mean they’re all doing hex bar deadlifts at the exact same loads. One girl might be doing 175lb on her hex bar deadlift because she has trained with me since middle school.
Another girl who is also the same age, might be still be learning with a lighter load at 100lb. Every female athlete is unique in what loads they’re doing in their own strength program.
When loads are too heavy too soon, technique breaks down and injury risk goes up. On the opposite end, when loads are too light for advanced girls, they plateau because the strength stimulus is too easy.
Circuit and cookie cutter workouts don’t account for these training age differences. It’s the same crap for everyone, no matter what level you are.
Especially for strength workouts, it’s critical to have girls on their own program.
For speed training in a group setting, it’s much easier to scale to general since speed is very simple: plyos, chase, race, and time sprints.
The bigger issue is, circuits don’t even train speed and the energy system needed to become more explosive.
True Speed Training
Too many girls are getting slower and are being held back from their speed potential.
Why?
Because circuits are glorified conditioning workouts. They don’t even train the proper energy system required for speed and explosive outputs.
More often than not, the good ol’ whiteboard workout has girls doing a movement for 30-60 seconds, then they bop right over to the next station in 10 seconds, and rinse and repeat.
This is not explosiveness training. This is busy work.
Training true speed requires quick bursts (just a few seconds) of max effort sprints, plyometrics, and/or medicine ball work, followed by long rest ~2-5 minutes, or even longer ~6-8 minutes for longer sprints.
We want to have fast nervous system firing and recruitment of muscle fibers for every rep.
If you start the next sprint too soon, your body cannot replenish ATP. This makes girls drop ~70% intensity in their next sprint, which ends up not getting them the best speed adaptation.
This bears repeating: circuits are glorified conditioning workouts, NOT true speed and explosiveness training.
True Hard Work
I know what you’re thinking, ‘but, but Erica, we do circuits because we want these girls to work hard and grind!’
Hmm, how about you do a heavy deadlift, 1.5x your body weight, for 4 sets of 5 and get back to me.
Or, how about you break a 18 MPH 10 yard fly?
How about you perform a perfect single leg RDL at half your body weight without losing balance?
That’s all hard work, too, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, adults have it as* backwards when it comes to hard work for youth female athletes. They believe it’s doing more. When really, it’s about quality outputs over quantity.
Circuits give the illusion that hard work is happening, when really, girls are going nowhere.
A program that is organized gives girls a roadmap and gradual progression.
When girls gradually progress their strength programs, they work up to higher intensity sets. Their muscles get a new, challenging stimulus to grow strong.
When girls learn the fundamentals of plyometrics, they do them at speed with quick ground contacts and fast feet!
And when they do basic plyos at speed, then they can do more advanced jumps, hops and bounds.
But don’t get it twisted…girls should not be going high intensity all the time.
Periodization is about low, medium and high days. It’s constant waves in intensity so girls don’t get burned out, fatigued, or injured.
True Development
Coaches say they preach true development, but is putting players through a random circuit that was thrown together a few minutes before the session development?
Is having 15+ girls doing all different things at once, allowing for any detailed technique coaching to happen? Nah, the coach thinks just blowing a whistle and being a cheerleader is sufficient…
No. It’s lazy.
True athlete development has a purpose and long-term plan in place. There’s teaching. Strength lifts, for example, must be taught properly so athletes master technique, and when technique is mastered, then they can begin to load heavy. Plyometrics, too, are highly technical. Girls must pop off the ground with the correct part of the foot to get the most out of them.
Too often, plyometrics in circuit style workouts are slow and clunky at best. And done with way too many reps, that slows the movement down and no longer gets an explosive adaption.
Youth female athletes deserve a speed and strength program that is individualized, periodized from week to week, progressed based on their age, training history, goals and needs, and COACHED.
Coaching is a totally different ball game that requires skill and knowledge. And just being a cheerleader as your girls grind through a circuit requires, well shocker, NOTHING.
Anyone can make a girl sweat.
Individualizing Team Training
It’s possible to individualize in a group setting. Give girls their own programs. Simple.
Sure, it takes a lot of initial work to write it all out, but your girls need it and DESERVE it.
A handful of them might be learning to hip hinge with body weight, while another handful are onto dumbbell deadlifts, while another few are onto heavy hex bar deadlifts.
Or, a few girls are doing an isometric lunge and owning the position, while another group is doing a dumbbell reverse lunges because they’ve already mastered body weight.
Meet girls where they are. Give them a program for their training age, level, body mechanics, and goals.
Stop doing random.
Don’t throw together a workout the day of.
Don’t be lazy.
Have a long-term plan in place.
Give them true athletic development, coach.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Work with Erica Mulholland, an internationally known youth female athlete trainer in Tampa (Land O’ Lakes Florida) for speed, agility, and strength training, specialist in growth spurt injuries, and late stage ACL rehab (must be at minimum 2-3 months into physical therapy and post-surgery to be considered): BOOK ASSESSMENT HERE
Interested in REMOTE SPEED AND STRENGTH TRAINING for Youth Female Athletes? BOOK A CONSULT HERE
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