Hi Nikolaj,

Although the concept of sensitive periods for certain basic motor skills as proposed in the LTAD model lacks scientific support, it can certainly be recommended to take the maturation status of athletes into consideration.

Strength gains are usually larger after PHV, but this doesn’t mean strength should only be trained after PHV. All skills like speed, strength and agility are always trainable and should always be trained regardless of the maturation status. More matured athletes can however do more complex exercises and use heavier loads during strength training.

Hope this helps!

Technical Report The BASES Expert Statement on Trainability during Childhood ...

Article The Youth Physical Development Model

I agree with Bas, when working with youth athletes, it always helps to know their maturity and growth status and the easiest measurements within a sports setting are height and weight measures in order to estimate peak height velcoity. It should be noted that the error can still be large in this estimate but can put youth athletes in certain groupings. The main point is not too over complicate it. Of course professional sports academies might be able to use x-rays of the wrist but this brings into question doses of radiation. The reason why growth and maturity measures are needed is because it will help coaches and the sports science teams begin to understand and quantify what responses (physiologically) are due to growth and maturation and what responses are due to the training stimulus, this is still largely unknown for most youth sports. I agree also with Bas that just because large strength gains have been found post PHV does not mean the athletes cannot strength before PHV. I am a big advocate of considering all my training options and just because a youth athlete can do something (i.e., strength train before PHV) it does not mean they have to. Therefore, all the team responsible for the training really need to think through what they are trying to achieve, how and why. Of course all this is taking palce within the maturity of the young athlete pyschologically, so again they might be able to handle training physically but if they are emotionally and pyschologically immature, it might not be a good time to input that training. Final point, all long term athlete models are as much a "philosophy or framework", as much as they are a bespoke plan, because the evidence base for all of them is weak.

Hi Bas and Craig.

Cheers to you both, and I agree in regards to both the practicality and validity (or lack there of) in using PHV as a way of grouping the youth athletes. I use this practice in my current works.

However I'm still curious on whether the outcome is optimized with this practice.

E.g. in team sports where there can be found large differences in the maturity within the same age groups.

I need to be more informed of the different stages, the different types of trainability and the outcomes of training in PHV groups rather than age groups.

The search continues... :)

Hi Nikolaj,

John Cronin, Cesar Meylan, Jon Oliver and Rhodri Lloyd have done some work look at the differences in training responses across different maturity groups and have provided some compelling evidence for bio-banding players for conditioning purposes. I currently work with the Premier League helping the various clubs track and monitoring growth and maturation in the academy set ups. I know that many clubs are actively bio-banding by maturity for conditioning purpose, grouping athletes by maturity whilst also considering technical and psychological readiness. I have also been involved in evaluating a number of tournaments bio-banding athletes by maturation status and the results have been very promising to date. These tournaments are designed to serve as adjuncts to age group competition and not as a replacement, challenging both early and late maturers in different ways. If you want to learn more about our work check out the project on my profile page and you will see a variety of links to media covering our work on bio-banding in football, rugby and tennis.  Craig is right by the way re the PHV measure, there is error associated with it and it is magnified in early and late maturing players (see the work of Koziel and Malina). As such I would recommend the Khamis Roche method as an more reliable alternative. Best of luck with your work and feel free to get in touch should you have any further questions. 

Cheers Sean

The following project will answer this question:

https://www.researchgate.net/project/Premier-League-Growth-Study

Cheers, Michael.

I've been following the project for some time - very exciting work being done! 😃👍🏻