Is my child training too much?

Your child's injury isn't bad luck — it's a maths problem

Here's the line I use with the parents I coach: an overuse injury isn't bad luck, it's a maths problem. On one side of the equation is load — everything the body has to absorb. On the other side is capacity — how much that body can currently absorb. When load climbs above capacity, tissue starts to fail. That's the whole model.

The mistake almost everyone makes is treating capacity as fixed. It isn't. Capacity is depressed by inadequate sleep, by poor nutrition, by a growth spurt, by illness, by exam stress. So the same training load can be perfectly safe one week and genuinely unsafe the next — same sessions, same coach, same child, different capacity. That's why "but he's always trained this much" doesn't protect anyone.

The three things to track at home

You can't see your child's capacity, but you can watch the three inputs that move it most: sleep, food, and growth. If sleep is short, meals are skipped, or they've just shot up a shoe size, capacity is down — and the training load that was fine last month now needs pulling back.

A simple tool helps here. Before training, have them rate three things from 1 to 5: how sore they feel, how tired they feel, and how stressed or "off" they feel. Average the three. A high score means train hard; a middling score means train light and technical; a low score means skip the hard stuff today. It takes ten seconds and it turns a vague worry into a decision.

Count the load across everything, not just sessions

Most parents count the visible training and stop there. But the body doesn't know the difference between a session, a match, a PE lesson and three hours in the park — it's all load. So count it all.

This is where school holidays catch people out. In term time a child might walk around 15,000 steps a day; over the holidays that can drop to around 5,000. Then school returns and activity roughly triples overnight — and if a new sport season starts in the same week, you've stacked a sudden spike on top of a fresh season. That's a genuinely risky combination, and it's invisible if you're only counting the obvious sessions. As a rule of thumb, most children tolerate around a 10% increase in load week on week if their sleep and food are stable. Push much past that and injury risk doesn't rise gently — it climbs steeply.

Training too much isn't the biggest risk. Training too much, too soon — that's the one that hurts them.

Why "too soon" is the real danger

When a child loads a bone hard, the body responds by laying down new bone to cope. But that new bone takes several weeks to harden. Load straight through that window — before it's caught up — and you risk a stress fracture. A bone bruise is often the warning shot: the body telling you it's behind on the repair.

So the question isn't really "is my child doing too much?" It's "is my child's capacity keeping up with what I'm asking of it?" Build load patiently, protect the three inputs, and respect the spikes. The kids who get hurt are rarely the ones doing the most — they're the ones who did too much, too fast, with capacity already down.

This guide is for understanding and decisions at home — it isn't a diagnosis. If your child has pain that persists, worsens, or worries you, see a doctor or physiotherapist.