Fewer hours than most families expect, with at least one completely empty day every week and one genuine off season every year. A widely used guide is that hours of organised sport per week should not exceed the young person’s age, so around fifteen hours at fifteen, counting everything.

Counting everything is the hard part

School sport and school fixtures. Club training. District, county, state or regional programmes. Private coaching. Gym or strength work. Matches. Travel to and from all of it.

Most families reach a number roughly double what they assumed, because every commitment was agreed separately with a different person and nobody has ever added them together. Do the sum on paper before changing anything. It is often the only intervention needed.

The empty day

One day a week with nothing scheduled. Not a light session, not a recovery swim, not video review. Nothing.

This is the first thing to disappear when a young athlete is doing well and the last thing anyone thinks to protect. It matters more than any single session in the week, and its absence is the most reliable predictor of a talented young person leaving their sport before eighteen.

Sleep

Eight to ten hours at this age, and someone training hard sits at the top of that range rather than the bottom. Nothing in a training programme produces more return than an extra hour of sleep, and nothing is more routinely sacrificed to fit a six in the morning session in.

The off season

Two to three weeks a year with no structured training in the main sport. Not injury enforced. Planned, in the diary, treated as part of the programme rather than as a failure of commitment.

Young athletes who have never had one do not know what fresh feels like, which makes it very hard for them to tell you when they are tired.

Signs the week is too heavy

Getting slower rather than faster across a block. Minor injuries that keep recurring. Sleeping badly on training nights. Irritability that arrives on a schedule. Losing interest in the parts of the sport that used to be fun, before the parts that are work.

More is not more

The instinct when a young athlete plateaus is to add. In almost every case the plateau is a recovery problem rather than a volume problem, and adding to it produces a short improvement followed by a longer decline.