Fifty-plus years in this game — I started playing rugby at 8, picked up my first barbell at 15, and I've been on one side of a weight room or the other ever since — has taught me one non-negotiable truth: what you do with a teenager in the weight room either builds the platform for ten or fifteen years of rugby, or it quietly wrecks it before it starts.

There's no in-between. Get this age group right, and you're not just building bigger, stronger kids for next season — you're building the raw material for the player when they'll be at 25.

This is the article version of a talk I give at schools and academies on exactly that: how to properly train the youth rugby player, from first exposure to the weight room through to a program that can carry a player from Year 9 to first grade.

It's the question I get asked more than any other, and it's the wrong question on its own. The right question is: at what age to start what? A kid can be exposed to loaded movement, coordination work, and basic strength patterns well before high school — the research and my own experience both say so. What changes with age isn't whether we train, it's how we load, how we progress, and how closely we watch.

That's where managing training load comes in, and the science here has moved a long way past "lift some weights and see how you go." The research on maturation status — particularly around Peak Height Velocity (PHV), the point of fastest growth during adolescence — should shape how every school runs its program:

I think the most important aspect of youth development is not to specialize too early in one sport but to "play the field" and build a broad base of different physical abilities and attributes. Growing up near the ocean in Australia, we had the chance in the summer months to be involved in junior surf lifesaving — Nippers, as it was called — along with swimming, board paddling, beach sprints, and other games.

There was also Little A's (Athletics), where we could try different track and field events, and gymnastics was on offer too, teaching us in a fun way how to land, roll, and keep the body under tension. Unfortunately, I never tried a martial art myself, but I saw firsthand how beneficial one can be.

A player I played with in age grade cut through the line and was sprinting away when, at the last moment, he was ankle-tapped — and he dive-rolled straight back to his feet and went on to score under the posts. From that moment on, I've thought, as I still do today, that learning a martial art or wrestling would be a wonderful addition to a rugby player's physical development program from the get-go — and that's all before we even start discussing the whys, whens, and hows of weight training.

Once you know who you're dealing with, the NSCA's youth resistance training consensus statement still holds up as the best plain-English checklist I know:

1. Qualified supervision, every session.
2. A safe, hazard-free environment.
3. Always start with a 5–10 minute dynamic warm-up.
4. Light loads first. Technique before load, always.
5. Build balanced work across the upper and lower body, symmetrical development, joint balance, and a mix of strength and power exercises.
6. Progress sensibly — typically 5–10% load increases — cool down properly, listen to the individual, and build toward 2–3 non-consecutive sessions per week.
7. Log the work, keep the program fresh, look after nutrition, hydration, and sleep, and make sure encouragement from coaches and parents keeps the kid interested.

A Simple Age-by-Age Ladder

Notice what's not changing fast: it's a slow, deliberate build in load and complexity, not a race to see how much a fifteen-year-old can squat.

Most of the common issues in youth training don't come from the weight room at all — they come from everyone around the kid working in their own silo. The school's PE program doesn't communicate with the club coach, who doesn't communicate with the S&C staff, who doesn't communicate with the parents. Meanwhile, the athlete is trying to build long-term outcomes — a physically active life, health and well-being, a shot at recreational or competitive sport — with no one managing the whole picture.

My framework puts the individual — and their health and well-being — dead center, with everything else: governance, resources, education, motivation, physical development, assessment, multi-sport exposure, and pla feeding in around them.

That's not a poster on the wall. That's the filter every program decision has to pass through.

I want scholar-athletes, not just athletes — kids who bring together teamwork, commitment, physical and emotional health, time management, work ethic, and leadership, because that combination is what actually holds up over a long career. Testing sits inside that picture, not above it.

I do not use too many tests, but one I really think is of great value is a timed run, which increases in distance each year of high school. In the last years of high school, the good old 2.4 km (1.5 mile) time trial was the one. Why? It requires no learning and is built on the shorter distances from previous years, starting with the 1.2 km time trial in the earlier years of high school. It is a great test to help develop programs for Maximal Aerobic Speed (MAS) while also demonstrating the ability to keep going from beginning to end. But the number is a data point in service of the athlete, not a judgment on their character.

If there's one lesson from fifty-plus years I'd want a sixteen-year-old actually to absorb, it's this one. Recovery isn't the thing you do when training stops — it's what makes the training count. Get it right, and you see reduced injury rates, better reaction times, faster sprint times, fewer mental errors, better accuracy under fatigue, and — over a full career — extended playing longevity. Get it wrong, and the symptoms of overtraining show up fast: mood swings, elevated morning resting heart rate, persistent fatigue, muscle soreness, loss of appetite, poor sleep, frequent colds, and a session that starts to feel like a grind rather than progress. Teach kids to notice those symptoms in themselves early, and you've given them a skill that outlasts their playing days.

This is where the player, coaching, medical, and performance staff all have to move in the same direction: Goal-Focused, Process-Driven, Outcome-Judged. For a school program, that means building around a small number of foundational movement patterns rather than an endless list of exercises — I lean on Bill Starr's push/pull/squat and Dan John's carry/squat/hinge/pull/push as the skeleton that everything else hangs off.

Around that skeleton sits the CARE program — Core, Accessory, Rehab Exercises — the work that fills the gaps every other program leaves out: the muscles you can't see and the areas most at risk of injury or reinjury in rugby. Grip, hamstrings, neck, anti-rotation, and loaded/unloaded core, thoracic mobility, groin, knee, ankle, rotator cuff, and shoulder integrity all get their own slot, with sets, reps, and load driven by the individual player's needs — not a generic template.

Loaded carries earn their own mention because they're one of the most undervalued tools in a school gym: minimal technical risk, huge carryover to the collisions and grip demands of the actual game, and they scale easily by goal, movement distance, and rest.

A Sample Week: 3 Days, Full Body

Simple on paper. The skill is in the loading, the exercise selection for that individual, and the coaching in the room, which is where I'd rather spend my energy than inventing more complexity.

None of the programming above means much if the environment in which it happens doesn't earn the players' respect. Every group I run trains under the same five rules, and they matter as much as any set-and-rep scheme:

I picked up early in my career, from a conversation with a Randwick captain who took the time to write back to a kid who wrote to him, that character should be the first selection criterion for a player, before ability, before size, before speed. The gym is where that character gets built or exposed, every single day, long before it shows up on a Saturday.

Everything above — the maturation science, the NSCA guidelines, the movement patterns, the testing protocols — is knowledge, and it's essential. But coaching a room full of teenagers through it, reading who needs pushing and who needs pulling back, keeping it fun while it's also genuinely developmental — that's wisdom, and it only comes from time in the room.