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Is this week too much?
Three questions about your child's week, a traffic light, and a straight answer about tomorrow's session.
Parents ask me "how many hours is too many?" expecting a number. The honest answer: it depends what their body has to spend this week. Injuries happen when load outruns capacity, and capacity isn't fixed. It drops with short sleep, poor food, exam stress, a growth spurt. The same training week can be safe in October and risky in January. So don't count hours; check the week. These three questions are how I'd check it.
The three things that decide the week
Answer for the current week. Count everything your child does, not just the sessions you drive them to: club training, matches, school PE, the second sport, the hours on the playground.
This week's load, against their normal
Add it all up in your head: club sessions, matches, school PE, other sports, active play. Compared with a typical week over the last month, this week is…
Bodies handle what they're used to; it's the sudden jump that injures, not the volume itself. The working rule from load science: build up by roughly 10 percent a week. A week around one and a half times their recent normal is the classic danger zone. And a "normal" week after three weeks of holiday is itself a spike, because the body's baseline dropped while the calendar's didn't.