Practice Makes Perfect
Learning to move is a skill just like anything else. To truly master something, we know it takes practice: rep after rep, day after day. Athletes do not learn movements from one great session. They learn them from good sessions stacked on top of each other over months and years. Athletes develop motor skills and coordination through repeated, consistent exposure to the same foundational patterns. The more quality reps an athlete gets, the quicker they will master the pattern. Even more important, the athlete executes the movement sequence automatically under load and speed, improving both performance and injury resilience in sport.
This is why long-term development models put so much emphasis on regular, well-coached sessions rather than occasional hard sessions (Lloyd & Oliver, 2012; Faigenbaum et al., 2016). A squat practiced three times a week becomes a skill. A squat practiced once a week is like starting over again and again, especially for young people whose bodies are rapidly growing and maturing.
The other factor coaches have to consider at every level, from pro to youth, is the schedule. A high school baseball or basketball player juggles school, practice, games, travel ball/AAU, tournaments, homework, and some version of a social life. Weeks rarely go as planned. A body-part split that trains legs on Monday falls apart the moment Monday gets canceled. The athlete may go two weeks without a real lower-body session. If Monday and Tuesday get canceled, you’ve lost the entire week.
A 3-day full-body program fixes this. Every session trains every major pattern. If an athlete misses a day, they still hit each pattern twice that week. If they only get two sessions in during a tournament week, nothing gets skipped entirely. Maybe that is Monday/Wednesday or maybe it is Tuesday/Sunday. Flexibility leads to consistency, and consistency is what drives results.
Why Three Days Beats One Big Day
Now that we know we want to train 2–3 days per week, the next question is how to split it up. Research on training frequency shows that when total weekly volume is equal, training a muscle group more or less often throughout the week makes little difference to muscle growth (Schoenfeld, Grgic, & Krieger, 2019). Knowing that a young athlete needs consistent exposure to patterns, a flexible schedule, and an emphasis on motor learning, we should feel even more confident spreading volume out across the week. On a “leg day” or “lower-body” day, the required volume forces the athlete to complete the last sets while tired, with sloppy technique and little benefit.
With three to four sets of each movement pattern three days per week, the athlete performs every set fresh, with better technique and more intent.
Figure 2 shows the difference. The same 48 sets look completely different when coaches spread them over three sessions. Shorter sessions of 45 to 60 minutes fit a busy schedule, leave a day or more between sessions for recovery, and give the athlete three chances a week to practice each pattern.
Minimal Effective Dose vs. Maximal Recoverable Volume
Before designing our training system, we need to decide where we sit on this spectrum. I’ve done both, and I think there is a time and place for each. I am as concerned about undertraining as I am about overtraining. An athlete who has never built strength or work capacity is less prepared for the demands of their sport, and the research backs that up: strength training cut sports injuries to roughly one-third in a meta-analysis of randomized trials (Lauersen, Bertelsen, & Andersen, 2014), and athletes who are not prepared for sudden spikes in workload appear to be at greater risk than those who have gradually built their workloads (Gabbett, 2016). Of course, the concerns around overtraining are also very real. Developing a program that walks this line is critical to helping athletes reach their potential. Let’s look at some definitions.
Minimal effective dose (MED) is the smallest amount of training that still produces a result. The good news is the dose is often lower than people think. Bickel, Cross, and Bamman (2011) trained adults 3 days per week for 16 weeks, then cut the dose for 32 weeks. In the young adults (ages 20–35), one-third of the original volume kept their muscle gains and even produced some additional myofiber growth, and one-ninth of the volume still held on to muscle size.
My experience is that young athletes with a low training age will respond to modest doses too, but for a different reason. Before puberty, most strength gains come from the nervous system learning to use the muscle it already has, not from muscle growth (Lloyd et al., 2014; Faigenbaum et al., 2016). That is good news: those neural gains come from frequent, high-quality practice, which is exactly what a 3-day template delivers.
Maximal recoverable volume (MRV) is the most training an athlete can do and still recover (Israetel, Hoffmann, & Smith, 2015). Go past it and fatigue piles up faster than fitness. Performance drops, tendons flare up, and injury risk rises. Our youth athletes play more games than ever. Regardless, we need to develop bodies that can handle the load, especially because growth plates and the tendon attachments around them are more vulnerable during growth spurts (Jayanthi et al., 2015). But defaulting completely to the “safe side” of very low volume and intensity leaves the athlete underprepared for a season that keeps getting longer.
Young people recover faster than adults between bouts of hard exercise (Falk & Dotan, 2006). A 13-year-old can usually handle another hard set of goblet squats but cannot take on more throwing or jumping volume. Coaches should emphasize strength training while balancing exposures to ballistic exercise that can aggravate tendons.
MRV moves around a lot from day to day. Because MRV is a moving target, coaches have a hard time adjusting training accurately. The 3-day program lets us train hard when we train, then take days off to balance fatigue. The 3-day program strikes a balance between MED and MRV approaches and keeps us in the productive range shown in Figure 1.
Building the Exercise Menu
The next step is to build movement categories, then fill each category with exercises. Exercise selection, or creation, is where art mixes with science.
The principles outlined in the first part of this article form the weekly structure. Then the coach selects, modifies, and creates exercises to solve individual problems. The movement categories make sure our weeks and months stay balanced. Based on the individual or the sport, you might want to emphasize a single category. For example, baseball players might hit a hip-dominant single-leg movement two out of three days.
Below is a filled-out example menu for a baseball player. Use the menu as a starting point, then swap in the exercises that fit your athletes, your sport, and your space. The last column is for athletes training at home or in a garage with dumbbells, bands, and a bench.
| Movement category | Beginner | Intermediate | Advanced | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Double Leg (Hip Dominant) | KB Elevated Deadlift | Barbell Stiff Leg Deadlift | Hang Clean | |
| Double Leg (Knee Dominant) | Goblet squat to box | Front squat | Back squat | |
| Single Leg (Hip Dominant) | Single Leg Glute Bridge | Landmine Single Leg RDL | Barbell Single Leg RDL | |
| Single Leg (Knee Dominant) | Box Step Downs | Goblet Box Step Ups | Barbell Step Ups | |
| Upper Body Push (Vertical) | Half-kneeling Single Arm DB Press | Single Arm Dumbbell Shoulder Press | Single Arm Landmine Press | |
| Upper Body Push (Horizontal) | Push Ups | Barbell Bench Press | Board Press | |
| Upper Body Pull (Vertical) | Band-assisted Chin-Up | Chin-Up | Weighted Chin-Up | |
| Upper Body Pull (Horizontal) | TRX Row | Inverted Row | Barbell Row |
For baseball, many coaches limit heavy overhead barbell work and lean on landmine and dumbbell pressing instead. The same menu works for basketball; you might simply add more knee-dominant single-leg and landing work.
Assigning Rep Schemes
Now that we have movement categories, we have to assign set and rep schemes. A youth athlete needs to develop all qualities throughout the year. As always, I refer to what I feel are the foundational principles of strength and conditioning and youth development. Soviet sport scientists originally developed the max effort, dynamic effort, and repeat effort methods, which Louie Simmons and Westside Barbell later advanced (Zatsiorsky & Kraemer, 2006).
| Method | Goal | Sets × reps | Load and effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Max effort (ME) | Strength | 4–6 × 8–3 | Heavy, 75–90+% of estimated 1RM on the top set. Limited by technical failure. |
| Dynamic effort (DE) | Power | 3–4 × 3–5 | Light to moderate, about 50–70%. Submaximal load moved at maximal velocity. |
| Repeat effort (RE) | Hypertrophy and work capacity | 2–4 × 12–8 | Movement quality and time under tension. Finish each set 1–3 reps short of failure. |
In a 3-day week, every movement category meets every method once per week. Figure 3 shows one way to rotate all three methods evenly.
Over a 9-week block, each method progresses in three 3-week steps:
| Method | Weeks 1–3 | Weeks 4–6 | Weeks 7–9 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Max effort | 4 × 8 at 45%, 55%, 65%, 75% | 4 × 5 at 55%, 65%, 75%, 85% | 4 × 3 at 65%, 75%, 85%, 90% |
| Dynamic effort | 3 × 3, target ~0.75 m/s | 3 × 4, target ~1.0 m/s | 3 × 5, target ~1.3 m/s |
| Repeat effort | 3 × 12, 2–3 reps in reserve | 3 × 10, about 2 reps in reserve | 3 × 8, 1–2 reps in reserve |
We reverse-cycle dynamic effort. As the max effort work gets heavier, the dynamic effort loads get lighter and faster, and the reps go up. That keeps the week’s total fatigue in check and trains the athlete across the whole force-velocity range. We reduce repeat effort reps as the block progresses, and the athlete works a little closer to failure.
Across the week, each pattern collects about 10 sets (4 ME, 3 DE, 3 RE). Not all of those are hard sets in the near-failure sense. But, for example, double-leg and single-leg patterns both train muscles such as the glutes and hamstrings, so their weekly hard-set totals land in the productive range from Figure 1. The athlete also practices each pattern three times.
Using the Velocity Targets, With or Without VBT
The dynamic effort targets are concentric bar speeds, so measuring bar speed requires a velocity-based training (VBT) device. On a squat or trap bar deadlift, roughly 0.75–1.0 m/s is often called strength-speed, 1.0–1.3 m/s speed-strength, and above 1.3 m/s starting strength (Mann, 2016). Treat those as general guides. The speed at a given percentage differs by exercise, device, and athlete (Weakley et al., 2021). Hitting 1.3 m/s on a squat usually takes a lighter load than the 50–70% range. When aiming to hit our fastest velocities, I will often use bodyweight or band-assisted variations.
Most coaches do not have a VBT device, and that is fine. Without a VBT device:
- Use percentages to set load. Use about 50–70% of the estimated 1RM depending on the desired velocity range.
- Coach intent. Cue every rep. Every rep should look and sound fast. If the weight looks heavy, it is too heavy.
- Use effort ratings. The load should feel light, around 5–6 out of 10 on an RPE scale.
- Measure what you can, such as jump height with tape on the wall or med ball throw distance. Give the athlete a number to chase whenever possible.
The Final Template and a Sample Week
Here is the whole system on one page. Each cell lists the movement category and its sets × reps for weeks 1–3, 4–6, and 7–9.
| Movement pattern | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Double Leg | ME · 4 × 8 / 5 / 3 | DE · 3 × 3 / 4 / 5 | RE · 3 × 12 / 10 / 8 |
| Single Leg | DE · 3 × 3 / 4 / 5 | RE · 3 × 12 / 10 / 8 | ME · 4 × 8 / 5 / 3 |
| Upper Body Push | RE · 3 × 12 / 10 / 8 | ME · 4 × 8 / 5 / 3 | DE · 3 × 3 / 4 / 5 |
| Upper Body Pull | ME · 4 × 8 / 5 / 3 | DE · 3 × 3 / 4 / 5 | RE · 3 × 12 / 10 / 8 |
Note: Single-leg sets are per leg.
Here is an example week with exercise selections for Weeks 1–3 of the 9-week program.
| Pattern | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Double Leg | Trap Bar Deadlift · ME 4 × 8+ | Box Jump · DE 3 × 3 | Landmine Squat · RE 3 × 12 |
| Single Leg | Split Squat jump · DE 3 × 3 | Dumbbell Single-Leg RDL · RE 3 × 12 | Dumbbell Split Squat · ME 4 × 8+ |
| Upper Body Push | Dumbbell Bench Press · RE 3 × 12 | Barbell Incline Bench Press · ME 4 × 8+ | Med Ball Chest Pass · DE 3 × 3 |
| Upper Body Pull | Chin-Up · ME 4 × 8+ (band-assisted) | Med Ball Slam · DE 3 × 3 | Chest-Supported Dumbbell Row · RE 3 × 12 |
Prep, correctives, speed, agility, conditioning, core, and other accessories sit outside this template, and the coach plans them around the template.
Adjusting the Sample Week
| If the athlete is… | Change this |
|---|---|
| 10–13 years old or in their first year of lifting | Use the beginner column of the menu. Treat ME as technique practice: stop the top set 2–3 reps short of failure, and progress by adding reps or a small load only when every rep looks the same. |
| A college-bound senior with 3+ years of training | Use the advanced column. |
| A basketball player | Keep the structure. Add more multi planar and knee-dominant single-leg work |
| Training at home or in a garage | Replace barbell ME with tempos to replicate time under tension. Use jumps and throws for DE. |
| A pitcher with shoulder or elbow soreness | Swap overhead and heavy pressing for landmine pressing or push-up variations. |
The Art of Coaching
The coach has to consider three factors every single session. The template will stay the same, but the exercises inside the template can change.
The athlete. Training age, technique, injury history, and position all matter. A 10-year-old in their first year of lifting gets goblet squats and push-ups. A college-bound senior with four years of training can handle barbell back squats with accommodating resistance. A pitcher with a sore shoulder gets landmine pressing instead of overhead barbell work.
Time of year. The offseason is for building: more volume and more new skills. Preseason and postseason shift toward dynamic effort and power. In-season training drops toward the minimal effective dose, keeping intensity and cutting sets.
Facility. Your space will dictate training more than any other factor. You can get the same, if not better, results with less equipment, but you have to adapt. Athletes train everywhere: school weight rooms, commercial gyms, and garages with dumbbells and a bench. Consistency and intent will matter more than the exact exercise.
The Bottom Line
Youth athletes get better through consistent exposure to the right patterns at the right dose. A 3-day full-body template delivers that. It fits a chaotic schedule, spreads the work so every set counts, and lets you dial volume up or down with the season. Build a menu, rotate max, dynamic, and repeat effort across the week, and match each exercise to the athlete in front of you. Keep it simple, keep it consistent, and the results follow.
Works Cited
Baz-Valle, E., Balsalobre-Fernández, C., Alix-Fages, C., & Santos-Concejero, J. (2022). A systematic review of the effects of different resistance training volumes on muscle hypertrophy. Journal of Human Kinetics, 81, 199–210.
Bickel, C. S., Cross, J. M., & Bamman, M. M. (2011). Exercise dosing to retain resistance training adaptations in young and older adults. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 43(7), 1177–1187.
Faigenbaum, A. D., Lloyd, R. S., MacDonald, J., & Myer, G. D. (2016). Citius, Altius, Fortius: Beneficial effects of resistance training for young athletes. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 50(1), 3–7.
Falk, B., & Dotan, R. (2006). Child-adult differences in the recovery from high-intensity exercise. Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews, 34(3), 107–112.
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Israetel, M., Hoffmann, J., & Smith, C. W. (2015). Scientific principles of strength training. Renaissance Periodization.
Jayanthi, N. A., LaBella, C. R., Fischer, D., Pasulka, J., & Dugas, L. R. (2015). Sports-specialized intensive training and the risk of injury in young athletes: A clinical case-control study. The American Journal of Sports Medicine, 43(4), 794–801.
Lauersen, J. B., Bertelsen, D. M., & Andersen, L. B. (2014). The effectiveness of exercise interventions to prevent sports injuries: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 48(11), 871–877.
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Lloyd, R. S., Faigenbaum, A. D., Stone, M. H., et al. (2014). Position statement on youth resistance training: The 2014 International Consensus. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 48(7), 498–505.
Lloyd, R. S., & Oliver, J. L. (2012). The youth physical development model: A new approach to long-term athletic development. Strength and Conditioning Journal, 34(3), 61–72.
Mann, J. B. (2016). Developing explosive athletes: Use of velocity based training in athletes (3rd ed.). Ultimate Athlete Concepts.
Schoenfeld, B. J., Grgic, J., & Krieger, J. (2019). How many times per week should a muscle be trained to maximize muscle hypertrophy? A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies examining the effects of resistance training frequency. Journal of Sports Sciences, 37(11), 1286–1295.
Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2017). Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and increases in muscle mass: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(11), 1073–1082.
Spiering, B. A., Mujika, I., Sharp, M. A., & Foulis, S. A. (2021). Maintaining physical performance: The minimal dose of exercise needed to preserve endurance and strength over time. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 35(5), 1449–1458.
Weakley, J., Mann, B., Banyard, H., McLaren, S., Scott, T., & Garcia-Ramos, A. (2021). Velocity-based training: From theory to application. Strength and Conditioning Journal, 43(2), 31–49.
Zatsiorsky, V. M., & Kraemer, W. J. (2006). Science and practice of strength training (2nd ed.). Human Kinetics.
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