Why your daughter's strength programme should not be your son's, scaled down

The exercises look similar. That's where the similarity ends.

If you watched a well-coached girl and a well-coached boy train strength, you'd see a lot of the same movements — squats, hinges, pushes, pulls, landing and jumping work. So parents reasonably assume the programme is the same, just with less weight. It isn't. The things that actually change a girl's programme sit underneath the exercises: when she's ready for each phase, how quickly you add load, and which injuries you're guarding against. Treating her programme as the boys' programme scaled down is a genuine coaching mistake, not a rounding error.

Girls mature earlier — so you programme off biology, not birthday.

Girls hit their growth spurt earlier than boys on average — peak height velocity around age 11 in girls versus around 13 in boys, with a wide normal range either way. The strength-sensitive window opens at a different time too. So the date on the birth certificate tells you even less for a girl than it does for a boy. What matters is where she actually is in her maturation. Programme for the child in front of you, not the age group she's filed under.

The real differences: load management and injury risk.

Here's the part that gets missed. Strength gains arrive differently — boys get a fast jump after the testosterone surge of puberty; girls build strength more gradually. That changes how aggressively you add load and when. And the injury-risk profile is different: a wider pelvis changes the angle at the knee (you may hear "knee valgus" — the knee tracking inward), which is one reason well-built strength and landing work matters so much for girls, precisely as protection. So the honest headline isn't "girls should do less." It's "girls should do strength work that's actually designed for them" — often that means more deliberate landing, control and strength work, not less.

The exercises aren't the programme. The timing, the loading and what you're protecting against — that's the programme.

The thing that quietly ends it — and it isn't training.

One more difference parents rarely hear from a strength coach. As girls move through puberty, body composition changes — that's normal physiology, not a problem to fix. But a careless comment from a parent or coach about a girl's body or weight is one of the most reliable ways to drive her out of sport altogether. Girls are far more sensitive to it, and it is, in my experience, the moment that stops many of them. Strong, capable, well-coached girls who feel good about what their bodies can do stay in sport. Protect that as carefully as you protect their knees.

This guide is for understanding and decisions at home — it isn't a clinical or training prescription for an individual child. For a programme, work with a coach experienced in adolescent and female athletes.