Login | September 13, 2026
Growth spurts
PETE GLADDEN
Published: September 14, 2026
If you’re a youth coach or parent who has young athletes participating in sports programs there’s something very important that you need to consider when prescribing or assisting with a young athlete’s workout regime.
And that something is growth spurts.
Now the term may sound innocuous enough, just a part of growing up, but growth spurts coinciding with a youngster’s involvement in sports can present some real challenges…and some serious hazards.
Thus, let’s take a quick look at situations where these two factors - growth spurts and a youngsters participation in sports - collide.
So the Cleveland Clinic describes growth spurts as, “Short periods of time when your child experiences quick physical growth in height and weight. Growth spurts are a normal part of your child’s development. They occur at different stages of childhood until they reach physical maturity.”
Now the thing about growth spurts is that when a period of this accelerated growth is occurring in a youngster, especially if it occurs when the young athlete is heavily involved in sporting endeavors, their coordination, balance and agility can suddenly take a temporary turn for the worse.
And such situations on the surface just don’t seem to have a logical explanation.
But under the surface, that’s where there just might lie a simple and logical explanation, the young athlete could be experiencing bone growth that is outpacing the growth of the connecting tissues - ligaments, tendons and muscles - thereby throwing everything off kilter.
During growth spurts muscles can tighten, balance and proprioception (body’s ability to sense its own position and movements in space) can worsen, performance can plateau or go backwards and their body’s recovery periods can change.
So as a coach or parent, if you don’t recognize what’s going on physiologically with your youngsters, and you continue to cue them through the same or an increasing volume-intensity-frequency workout regime, well, that's where some serious overuse problems can develop.
And there’s some great research out there which has revealed that the more rapidly a child is growing the more apt they are to incur growth-related injuries, with the vast majority of these injuries happening right around the time the growth spurt is occurring.
So with that being said, how do you recognize a growth spurt and what can you do when it occurs, especially when the youngster in question is deeply involved in a sports conditioning/training/competition scenario?
Well, healthcare specialists in pediatric care and strength & conditioning specialist involved in youth sports offer a quick and uncomplicated way to track and asses a youngster’s status with respect to growth spurts - use height measurement along with feedback.
Simply administer a standing-height measurement on the youngster each month to check for accelerated growing spurts, that in conjunction with feedback (quick Q&A session) in which the youngster is queried about any new pains, soreness, stiffness and/or feelings of being a little bit “off” in her/his athletic endeavors at that time.
Now if you do ascertain that a growth spurt is occurring you don’t just abruptly curtail the youngster’s participation in the sport, just understand that those are the times when you don’t forge ahead with volume/intensity increases in things like throwing, running, jumping and the like.
The consistency of training should continue, but there should be a reduction in maximal effort type training, that along with fewer back-to-back hard training sessions.
Another strategy is to focus more on technique-based training and focus less on HIIT (high intensity interval training) and any kind of high impact training during growth spurts.
Then there’s the importance of strength training with regard to growth spurts.
A well planned and well supervised strength training program is an integral bulwark against injuries to youngsters who are experiencing growth spurts, and research has show that youth who participate in such strength training/neuromuscular training routines tend to experience a reduction in lower extremity injuries.
Finally, be proactive when encountering chronic pains and/or soreness situations with youth athletes, and when such chronic situations do occur refer the youngster to a health care professional for a proper diagnosis.
Understanding the growth spurt phenomenon and knowing how to spot such occurrences when working with young athletes will help to keep them on the field, in the gym or in the water instead of sitting out a growth spurt-related injury on the sidelines.