The uncomfortable truth first: nobody can hand you an exact number. But the research on youth overuse injury and burnout gives honest guardrails, and — more useful — the early warnings show up at home before anything shows up at the physio.
The rules of thumb used across sports-medicine guidance:
- Hours per week shouldn’t outrun age. A common guideline: no more organised-sport hours per week than the child’s age in years. A 12-year-old at 16 weekly hours is outside it.
- Spikes hurt more than totals. The injury pattern isn’t usually “trains a lot” — it’s “suddenly trains much more than last month.” Camps, new teams and pre-seasons are exactly when this happens. Ramp, don’t jump.
- Growth spurts change the math. During fast growth, tissue tolerance drops while enthusiasm doesn’t. The same load that was fine in autumn can be too much in spring — the growing-athlete complaints (heel, knee) love those months.
- At least one true rest day a week, and real off-season weeks. Doing nothing on a rest day is also training done right.
The four quiet signals, in the order they tend to appear — all visible at home:
- Pain — heel, knee, anything that’s not ordinary soreness. Pain is information, never a test of character.
- Morning lag — a kid who used to wake before the alarm and now has to be dragged up, day after day, is carrying sleep debt or load debt.
- Appetite dips — overload suppresses it before performance drops.
- Mood at training — engaged versus going-through-the-motions. You’ll feel this before anyone measures it.
And one more instrument, the most underrated: is it still fun? Not every session — but over weeks. Enjoyment draining away is usually the first sign the load, the role or the pressure is wrong (why we treat fun as a signal).
The hardest part is that motivated kids don’t self-limit — the ones most at risk are precisely the ones who’d never ask to stop. The load decision belongs to the adults. A question worth sitting with at the end of a heavy week:
did i add pressure — or take it off?