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. And to be precise about when it starts: before puberty, a well-coached girl and boy can run largely the same programme — the real divergence arrives with the growth spurt, which for girls comes earlier.

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

Girls hit their growth spurt earlier than boys — on average about two years earlier. It gets going around age 11 in girls versus around 13 in boys (peak height velocity, the fastest growth, follows about a year later), with a wide normal range either way. And the strength-sensitive window opens earlier 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. Because girls reach puberty earlier, the phase where the body starts building real muscle actually opens earlier for them — around age 12, versus around 14 in boys. What differs is the size of the jump: boys get a steeper surge after their testosterone rise, while a girl's build is steadier. Earlier, but more gradual — not later. 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. It isn't a small effect: non-contact ACL injuries — the knee giving way on a landing or a cut, with no one else involved — are roughly two to five times more common in girls, and they cluster in the teenage years. The protection is exactly this kind of work: landing, balance, core and strength, built in from early adolescence and kept there. 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. There's a cruel twist worth knowing: the girls who develop early — taller, stronger, more powerful than their peers — are often the ones whose confidence takes the hardest hit, the opposite of what happens with early-developing boys. The girl who looks physically ahead can be the one who feels most exposed. Which is exactly why what you say about her body matters more, not less, when she is the strong one in the group. 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.