Growth and maturation are two important processes that occur throughout an individual’s childhood and adolescent years. The purpose of this article is to review the dimensions, proportions, stature, body mass, and maturational events of all female pediatric athletes in general. It also serves to identify how early sport specialization and different modes of training of the female pediatric athlete affects her growth and maturation.

This infographic highlights seven effective strategies to reduce the risk of injury in young athletes for strength and conditioning coaches.

In this session from the 2019 NSCA National Conference, Rhodri Lloyd, Co-Founder of the Youth Physical Development Centre, examines the science and practice behind the development of athleticism in youth athletes.

The administration and measurement of youth power development has become more available and familiar with the advances of technology. This excerpt introduces varieties of testing and administration practices to assess power in the youth population.

Early sport specialization involves physically immature children participating in intensive year-round training and/or competition for a single sport. The lack of sport exposure and diversification during the developmental years may underlie the increased risk of overuse injuries, blunting of motor skill development, psychosocial issues, overtraining syndrome, burnout, and potential dropout from sport. With increasing number of youth choosing, or being encouraged, to specialize at an early age, we aim to provide evidence based recommendations for the integration of strength and conditioning into the development programs of young athletes who participate in sports with a culture of early specialization. In addition to the principles of programming, strategies are provided relative to monitoring of growth, maturation, and training load to illustrate the potential complexities of attempting to optimize long-term athletic development in early specializing athletes.

Rhodri S. Lloyd, lead author of the LTAD Position Statement, provides an abbreviated look at what long-term athletic development is and how strength and conditioning professionals can implement effective training strategies into programming to improve health, well-being, and growth.

This article applies LTAD principles to guide the process of generating an athletic profile (part 1) and sample program design (part 2) for a middle school athlete and a high school athlete.

The purpose of this article is to make the case for implementing non-traditional sports into training programs that prepare youth for participation in traditional American sports and bridge the gap between pedagogy of physical education and strength and conditioning youth coaching.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the different opinions regarding the validity of early sport specialization as opposed to diversification, specifically the effect these two methods have on injuries, motor development, skill acquisition, and social and psychological aspects.

This book excerpt from Developing Agility and Quickness describes the windows of opportunity in youth athletes to time progressions in speed and agility training with their biological and chronological development.