One of the real concerns parents and others have held since the inception of Central Coast Sports College has been the dreaded ‘B’ word. Yep, ‘Burnout.’ The common ‘Aussie mentality’ towards football youth development is that kids should train 2-3 times a week for a combined training time of around 4-5 hours a week to avoid injury or burnout.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of the renowned publication, ‘Outliers’ (a book examining the factors that contribute to high levels of success) repeatedly talks about the 10,000 hour rule, claiming the key to success, in any field, to a large extent, is a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. Extensive research has shown that there is hardly a single top performer who dodged this 10,000 hour rule. If you were to train 3 days a week, as do many academy programs across the country, for 40 weeks of the year, it will take (by my admittedly dodgy mathematics) 55.5 years to achieve 10,000 hours of practice. Unfortunately, a footballer in their mid 60s is no good to anyone!
But what about our kids health? Surely if kids spend more than a few hours a week playing football they will get injured, or worse still, lose the passion for the game?
Lyle Micheli, M.D, co-founder of the worlds first sports medicine centre for kids & past President of the American College of Sports Medicine, published a paper examining training loads for kids to avoid overtraining, injury & mental fatigue and provided the following recommendation to parents and youth coaches; ‘As a general rule, children shouldn’t train for more than 18-20 hours per week.’ Yep, you read it right, 18-20 hours per week.
Can we knock the ‘B’ word on the head now please?
Karen Gray says
Even if you decided to train the kids all day every day….I’m afraid it still wouldn’t be enough for Carson. He is loving the training.