How to Design a Workout for a 13-Year-Old Soccer Player w/ Prehab / Rehab

How do you properly train a 13-year-old soccer athlete without risking injury or burnout?

In this episode of the Show Up Fitness Podcast, we break down exactly how to design a safe, effective workout for a young soccer player, focusing on long-term development—not short-term performance.

Whether you’re a personal trainer, coach, parent, or youth athlete, this episode will help you understand how to build strength, speed, and coordination the right way.

You’ll learn:

• How to structure workouts for a 13-year-old athlete
• The balance between strength, speed, and skill work
• What to avoid when training young athletes
• How to reduce injury risk and support long-term development
• Age-appropriate exercises that actually transfer to soccer

This episode focuses on building a strong foundation for performance, confidence, and durability—so young athletes can improve without being overtrained or pushed too hard too soon.

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Transcript

Show Up Fitness Welcome

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Show Up Fitness Podcast, where great personal trainers are made. We are changing the fitness industry one qualified trainer at a time with our in-person and online personal training certification. If you want to become an elite personal trainer, head on over to showufffitness.com. Also make sure to check out my book, How to Become a Successful Personal Trainer. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review. Have a great day and keep showing up. Howdy,

The Client Goal And Timeline

SPEAKER_00 0:29

y'all. Welcome back to the Show Up Fitness Podcast. Today we're going to help you design a program for a 13-year-old soccer athlete. Male Hunk wants to get stronger two months before the season begins. Pops wants him to get stronger and make the team. I'm going to go over strength and conditioning protocols from the NSCA, needs analysis, but I'll also help you better assess so you can then sell at a higher rate. Because at the end of the day, you got to sell Pops on why you're the trainer to be working with his son. This comes from a trainer at Lifetime, Miss Brittany. How are we doing? She got hired. She has her SUF CPT, kicking ass in Sacramento. 13-year-old boy coming in, and he's going to be working with her. So what we need to do is we need to look at the resistance training variables that are going to be associated with this program design.

Needs Analysis For Youth Soccer

SPEAKER_00 1:22

We're going to start with the needs analysis, and I'll go over what that entails. We're going to look at exercise selection, training frequency, the order of exercises, load repetitions, volume, and then really importantly, the rest periods. It's so easy to get caught up in the toxicity of social media. You follow a soccer player and you look at what that trainer is doing with them, and then you do those exercises. But we are not a textbook influencer. We are qualified coaches. So you have to go off of what the science supports. So when we look at the needs analysis, that's going to incorporate the movement analysis, the physiological analysis, and the injury analysis. So let's begin there. What plane of motion is soccer? There's a lot of sagittal, yes, but you got to have that frontal plane stability. So you need to be strong in all planes of motion. What are the most common injuries associated with the sport? Tons of ACL tears. Why is that? Maybe we don't have the quad and gastroc strength. The adductors are really important as well. Are we training all the movement patterns and planes of motion? The most common injuries that you're going to see in soccer are going to be at the knee. Our instructor Megan, she's a professional soccer athlete. She blew out a knee, then blew out the next knee, and then blew out the first knee again. That's very common to see because of one, the strength and conditioning protocols prior, but then the rehab process and getting back into sport too fast from psychological reasoning and/or the healing process hasn't gone through its full recovery. It's important to have a physical therapist on your team so you can talk to them, interview them, survey them, and come up with the best program. You want to incorporate exercises that could potentially prevent some of these injuries associated with that sport. And then the last one's going to be a physiological analysis looking at bioenergetics. So soccer is going to be about 50% ATP PCR, which is creatin phosphate system. That's the fast, explosive, zero to 30 seconds of high-intense work. When it comes to bioenergetics, it's always about duration and intensity. When it comes to glycolysis, it's about 20% of the sport. And then the last one being oxidative, about 30%. And this is taken from FOSS ML in 1998, the physiological basis of exercise and sport, the sixth edition. The stuff still stands true today. When it comes to sport specificity, I'm going to train a soccer athlete a little different than someone who's playing golf or basketball or volleyball. You need to look at the athlete sport and then design a program that fits their needs. That's the specificity, specific adaptation to impose demand. As great coaches, we factor all this in into the programming.

Preseason Planning And Parent Buy-In

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Mobility is important, longevity is important. So you need to have a good sit down with Pops at that meeting because you're essentially going to be selling him. Does he feel comfortable with his son working with you? Why should he sign up with you? So that's why the professionalism is super, super important. You need to ask great questions, but also the kidneys are like you as well. We're not doing body fat testing or any type of calipers on anyone under 18. Use your head on the assessment process. Blood pressure, don't really need to do that, not a big concern. He's a 13-year-old, and I'm taking the consideration of that he's been training, he's been moving because he's a 13-year-old and he's serious about this. I want to learn more about is he doing, you know, club and the AAU stuff? Because it's been shown that if we get too much into the sport year-round, you're more prone to future injuries. I want to know if this kid likes other sports. We are in the preseason, so the moderate intensity and moderate volume is going to be implied. If it were to be off-season, then the training protocols would be a little different. That's when the intensity goes up significantly, the volume goes up as well. And then when you are in sport, the intensity stays pretty high, but then the volume comes down significantly. These are all things that are really important as a strength coach, but you're going to have these opportunities as a trainer to help your clients at a gym environment. You're not advertising yourself as a strength coach, but there's going to be opportunities with young athletes, youth athletes who want to get better at their sport. And so this is a fun time to make sure that the program is appropriate and then you are fine-tuning your skills. If this was a kid who is brand new to lifting weights, he hasn't done anything, the programming would be a little different. The frequency would be a little less, maybe two times per week. If you're intermediate, three to four, five times a week, and then advanced, you can get up to seven times a week. So this is where I want to ask pops how do you want me to be involved with your kid's success? Do you want me just to focus on the strength training? Do you want me to do conditioning? Do you want to have a day of all strength, a day of all conditioning? Or would you like me to combine that into one? How many days a week would you like to train with me? And really most importantly, what does success look like for these next two months? I'm going to be very, very proactive as well. Would it be okay if I reached out to a strength coach that works on that team or the coach? I want to get involved to get into their mindset and how they program and train because their coach could have no background in strength and conditioning. And that could lead you into an opportunity working with other players, A, or B, you find out that they're doing a lot of inappropriate stuff, like they're doing a ton of oxidative work, which is low intense, but it's long duration, which is not optimal for the sport. So you have to be kind of careful not to step on toes. I know that may sound like counterintuitive, like, well, this is the right way to do it, but that's the politics of it. Because if you start training this kid and you say, oh, your coach is wrong, you're doing everything wrong, I'm the right way. Now you could potentially lose out on a client because maybe even the dad has these preconceived ideas on how to train. So the assessment process is really the psychological analysis to see where they're at and showcasing you as the professional when it comes to that first workout and the further design when it comes to periodization. You have a two-month block right here. He doesn't need to stop training when he starts the sport. It would actually be beneficial for him to continue to train with you during the season. And you could use resources where you send them stuff. Here's a position stand on kids lifting weights and why it's so beneficial. Here's an article or a podcast from Eric Cressy talking about why kids shouldn't be doing a sport year-round. As an expert strength coach, you want to send them stuff that confirms the things that you're doing, but also educates the parents. You are looking out for their best interest. Nutrition will play a huge role. You want to talk about sleep. You want to talk about stressors that could be going on. And there's going to be a time when you have the kid on a one-off when maybe Pops isn't there to just relate and bond with him to find out really what he wants. I remember I worked with a kid who was about the same age, and the dad came to every single one of the training sessions. We would do 10 reps, and the dad would be in my ear saying, You come on, you can do four more, do four more. And the kid was really stressed out from the overbearing parent. So that's tough. So you have to factor all that stuff in.

Assessments And Youth Training Boundaries

SPEAKER_00 8:38

So let's go through what a program would look like for an intermediate soccer athlete. You do a good warm-up to chest out where they're at. Look at their mobility, their flexibility. If you find some weaknesses there, implement that within the warm up. Make sure to check off those 10 checkpoints of human movement. Ankle, super important. Make sure they have the required and requisite dorsiflexion, knee health, hip health, going to the lumbar, thoracic, cervical, shoulder, elbows, and wrist, core stability, breathing mechanics. Upper body isn't nearly as important, but you need to be strong. And that's something that the kid is stressing. The data is at least. Don't confuse strength with a one to five rep 85 to 100% of your one rep max. The kid may not be able to do a push-up, or maybe he can do three and he wants to be able to do 10. So during the assessment process, you're gathering this data. How many pull-ups can he do? What does a landmine press look like? Has he been doing plyos? What type of jumps has he been doing? Does he have any injuries right now or anything? Talking to him a little bit. Maybe you need to do some soft tissue stuff, but I'm not going to do it as the trainer. This would be the one time I would do it next to him. I would grab a tennis ball, or if this is going to be a good time to use one of the guns to get into the adductor magnus and that stecko technique. I'm not going to be touching anyone under the age of 18 just because it doesn't look professional and it's not professional. You don't need to be doing that. You can modify it to make it appropriate for that individual. Get into the calves, do some soft tissue, the foam rolling and so forth. Get into the thoracic mobility because if we can't rotate, especially when we're planting that foot, you need to have that rotation. There could be some kinks in the chain that you want to check off to make sure they're competent with movement. Now,

Strength Day Exercise Order

SPEAKER_00 10:13

when it comes to the programming after the warm-up, I would start and you should start with the most explosive, powerful thing. So this is just going to be strength specific. And then I'm going to go over what a conditioning workout would look like. You could combine them two, but I'm going to pitch to dad. He should be working with me four to six times a week. What do you want? What is in your budget? A, but what do you want? And it's really easy when Pops is there because you're selling dad. You're selling them on the idea that you want to make the team. That's that emotional value. And the more that the kid works with you, the better off. Especially when you're at a big fancy gym, you could have just a recovery day. You have all that uh equipment and technology. You could do 10 minutes of the neurotech, whatever it is, and it's helping with lymphatic drainage. That's the value of those are actually really valuable recovery tools. You can work on some flexibility, some mobility training. Look into optimizing your functional range, conditioning, your cars, controlled articular rotations. You could have a day where you're just doing recovery. So that's why it's important to find out from the parent what they want. If they want one day a week, that's fine. It's gonna be strength and conditioning. If you want two days, full body, do you want upper lower? Do you want the conditioning on a separate day? These are all things I'm gonna learn during that assessment process. So we need to start with the most explosive things first. So after the warm-up, we'll do some lateral jumps with some stabilization. So he's gonna jump, stabilize, keep that knee in line with the toes, teaching good laning mechanics. We're not landing like an elephant. And then I'm gonna do an accessory there with some hip flexions into abduction, controlled eccentric to strengthen the glutes and the hip flexors. We'll do three to five jumps and then eight to ten repetitions for the flexor exercise. After that circuit, we go into the first CCA, which would be a reverse lunge into a landmine, into a landmine paylock. So we have that unilateral pattern focusing on the glutes and quads into a landmine press, get the core involved because it's unilateral overhead pressing, a lot more shoulder-friendly as well. And then that payload where you hold right in front of him, and then you're gonna pull and he has to resist that anti-rotation. We'll be doing three rounds of that, moving into the next CCA, which would be a step up, add some weight there if you want to do an offset sagittal plane. And then we're gonna do some push-ups and do some reverse nordics. Great for quad isometric strengthening. If that was too challenging, you could do a wall sit. I wouldn't do Nordics quite yet. I would start with the reverse Nordics, and then later on, maybe weeks two and three, some Copenhagen planks for the adductors. And then if you felt it was appropriate, you could get into Nordics. Great exercise for the hamstrings. And we'll do three rounds of that. When we do the reverse nordics, you're doing those for maybe 10 to 15 seconds at a time. Vary the area that you're going to be strengthening. So if I'm sitting straight up at 90 degrees, I go back 10, 20 degrees, hold for 10 seconds, come up, then I'll go back 30 to 40 degrees, hold for 10 seconds, and then repeat and go down a little further. For that last round, we'll do some goblet Q sacks, which is really great for frontal plane stability, teaching the squat pattern. And then we'll do some pull-ups if you can. If you can't, we'll regress to an Aussie or a TRX row. And we'll do some airplanes. I love airplanes because it takes away the knee and you're just focusing the hip. The sartorius, TFL, and gracilis are bi-articulate hip and knee muscles. So when you bend the knee and you flex it, and you're either on a bosom ball, yes, boose ball or a bench, you have to stabilize in that frontal plane, putting a ton of stress on the upper fibers of the glutes and the glute mead. I love that exercise. You can even bring in a soccer ball, throw it to him and get involved, make it fun in that regard. The most important thing, this is kind of like taboo, because yeah, you want it to be fun, but you need to be specific to the sport and he needs to improve. He wants to get stronger, he wants to make the team. So there's that fine line where you don't want to just be drilling the kid so hard that now it's not enjoyable, but at the same time, pops is in your ear and they want and they have a goal of getting the kid to make the team. If you have time, end off on some calf work, really important to do unilateral single leg stuff there, calf raised machine, seated and standing. So after you do that calf work, if you want to throw in some arms, if the kid wants a little arm pump, that's fine. That would be the strength day.

Conditioning Day Sprints And Cutting

SPEAKER_00 14:23

So then I would let them know that why don't you come back in for another workout? I'll show you what a conditioning day would look like. And when you when you just do a conditioning day, it's really, really important. The program design is optimal. You wouldn't want to start off by running a mile and then doing some plyometrics and two sprints and so forth. You do the aerobic stuff at the end. Aerobic is going to be classified as anything you can do prolonged for three plus minutes. Primarily utilizing fat, you'd put that at the end of the workout. So you do a good little five, 10-minute warm-up, dynamic warm-up, getting everything activated and ready to go psychologically. And then we would start with 40-meter sprints. If you had a treadmill, you can do that, but a lot of lifetimes and equinoxes will have some turf that you can get out there. That's a little more sport-specific. I would prefer that. So you do a 40-yard sprint, which will take about, you know, it's five to eight seconds. And then it's important that we rest appropriately. When it is PCR, phosphocreated, it's a 10 to 20 times rest to work. So if it took him five seconds, minimum we're resting a minute, ideally closer to two minutes. And then we'll do three rounds of that. And then next drill, we're going to do some start-stop for some deceleration. You're going to sprint for 20 yards, and then you're going to come back 10 yards backpedaling and then sprint for 20 yards, back for 10, sprint for 20. Then you'll do that for three rounds. Again, resting one to two minutes between sets. You can talk about life, school, whatever, bond with the kid. Make it enjoyable with the conversations, but always make it appropriate. The third exercise we can do is some cutting drills. In a sprint position, you go forward five, 10 yards, and then at the sound of your clap, it's a reactive drill, you're going to cut to the right and you're going to sprint for another five, 10 yards. And when you clap again, they have to cut to the other direction. Very sport specific to soccer. If you didn't have the space to do that, you're going to need to look to find some great drills that will be appropriate. Ladder drills are fancy for online, but they are not sport specific. Check out Fred Duncan, great strength coach, works with a lot of the elite athletes, and just overall a good dude because he's smart and intelligent. And I like him a lot because he has a big following. That's unfortunate that we have to even say that today, but it'll be easy to follow Messi or one of those guys' quote unquote coaches, and they're doing a bunch of asinine irrelevant stuff, but it's flashy for Instagram, but it's not really benefiting the athlete. So Fred Duncan has some awesome stuff on social media. You could implement the appropriate cutting drills for that, three rounds. That's going to take about 30 to 40 minutes right there. So the last one we then get into anaerobic conditioning. A common drill that you'll see is like a 300 meter shuttle run. That's going to be about 60 to 90 seconds, depending on the kid's conditioning. Here's when we'd want to be resting two to three work to rest ratio. So if it takes them a minute to complete the drill, then you'd be resting three minutes and then you'd repeat for two to three rounds, depending on how he's doing. Have some glucose tablets because maybe he hasn't done a full hour of just conditioning. Last thing you want the kid to be throwing up on the gym floor, it's going to make you look terrible. Dad might like it, but that's not appropriate for the kid. So you would do one to two of those rounds. And if time permits, that's when you'd incorporate some aerobic conditioning. Go hop on the treadmill, run for three minutes, walk for a minute or two. Run for three minutes, walk for one or two. And I like the, you know, the two to three minutes because doing a mile or two, it could be beneficial. But again, look at the sport of soccer. I'm not a soccer player. I don't, you know, football, soccer, whatever. I am not a soccer athlete, never been gifted with my feet, but I'm a great strength and conditioning coach. I can train anybody, and that's the difference between a great coach and an influencer. They're training you anecdotally, and that's what a lot of coaches do. I played soccer and this is what I did. Therefore, I'm going to do the same stuff. You want to make sure the order of operations is apparent to that athlete and the sport, looking at their conditioned state. So you would do the remaining aerobic stuff at the end of the workout, and that would be a specific conditioning day. I would highly encourage you to show two of those workouts. And then

Packaging Sessions And Pricing

SPEAKER_00 18:37

you could sit down with pops and say, okay, so normally each one of my sessions is 150. I gave you two comp sessions to show you what strength looked like, to show you what conditioning looked like. Would you like for me to train your son as a strength day, conditioning day, strength day, conditioning day, strength day? Or do you want the whole session to be strength and conditioning? I can modify that based on what you would like from me as your son's coach. When I say coach, I'm talking about strength coach. You do not need to have your CSCS to incorporate this stuff. A competent coach who understands movement analysis, the competency of the appropriate exercises based on an intermediate athlete. If he was a beginner, you just regress those movements back. Maybe not start with a lunge. You'd start with the step ups. The gobbits would be an appropriate one to do there. I wouldn't be doing back squats for a beginner. Start with the fundamentals of that movement. You're hitting upper body patterns as well with pushing, pulling, getting the shoulders as well. And then add in the accessory stuff for injury prevention and/or deficits in mobility. You could do some hip 90-90 shin boxes to see how that looks with him. And then the airplanes are great ones for the hip and the knee, as well as calves for the gastroc, because that's a really important muscle to strengthen, as well as the quads. You will see most strength coaches will program in like a 1A, 1B style. So that's gonna be your core movement pattern followed by another core movement pattern. It's the same as a CCA. I use the A for mobility, prehab, rehab stuff. At the end, if you're gonna incorporate this into a full strength and conditioning workout, you do your METCON at the end. So taking the stuff from the conditioning day, I would put that into a 10 to 15 minute ending where you would do the anaerobic stuff at the end. You may have to sprinkle some of the jumps, as I said earlier, with some of the agility stuff because you want to optimize the non-fatiguing exercises and movements first. And then at the end is when you do the more fatiguing stuff. Just to reiterate,

CSCS Standards And Trusted Resources

SPEAKER_00 20:34

you do not need your CSCS to incorporate strength and conditioning for an athlete. If you wanted to work with the Division I, II or professional team, they would want to see that CSCS designation, which by 2030, you have to have a sports science degree. Right now, you can still take the CSCS with the fifth edition book that just came out. We have a study guide for it. We've helped people pass it, but really our main focus is our own certification because the SUF CPT gives you the fundamentals to work with athletes at this level. But again, if you wanted to go to that elite level, you'd have to get your CSCS. And by 2030, you have to have a degree in kinesiology, whereas now it's any degree to take your CSCS. There's other cert performances out there that I just think are complete bullshit. I've taught a lot of them. NASA and PES, do not get that. That's just a waste of time and money, in my opinion, because I taught that stuff at MPTI. It does not follow the optimization as the NSCA. The NSCA has a strength and conditioning journal, the journal of strength and conditioning research. That is the Bible for sports performance. So if you're working with athletes, that's the stuff you need to be learning from and following great coaches like Tony Genocore, Eric Cressy, Fred Duncan, and people who are in the trenches helping athletes, specifically based off of science and the most appropriate protocols to date. So now you're prepped with the scientists. Scientific side with the programming variables and so forth. When

How To Close The Sale

SPEAKER_00 22:03

it comes to the sales part, because we're salesmen, I'm sorry, get over it. Don't be afraid of it. You sit down and you ask, How did you like the workout, Johnny? Oh, it was amazing. This was awesome. Pops, Johnny loved it. What are you thinking? What's going through your mind right now? I showed you a conditioning day. I showed you a strength day. Do you want those individual? How many days a week do you want your son to train with me? And I'll be willing to bet if you show that value, dad's going to say, Well, what do you think? And that's when I'm going to say five or six days. Based on how the kid responds, and you got factor in everything with the recovery stuff. It could be six days with a day of recovery. It could be five days with upper, lower, upper lower in a conditioning day. You use your knowledge with implementing daily undulating periodization, which will optimize this block for the following two months. And then you smile and you wait for dad to take out his black Amex because that's what's going to happen if you're a qualified coach. If you want more examples of strength and conditioning like this and programming, shoot us a message. Make sure to follow us on Instagram, on Facebook. We have the qualified personal trainers community. We love it when you throw this into your story. It helps trainers and coaches know there's more out there for them than just random textbooks that don't set them up for success. Not only are we going to help you program and assess appropriately, whether if it's general population, athletes, or people in pain, but we're going to help you build your confidence when it comes to that sales process. And that's why SUF CPTs make two to five times more than the average trainer and they get hired and placed at the best gyms. Remember, big biceps are better than small ones and keep showing up.