What does a conditioning program look like for a middle school athlete?

When we talk about middle school athletes they’re just getting ready to get started into a sports enhancement program and often parents have questions to make sure they get them into the right type of program. With the middle school athlete we have to be careful/cautious on what types of activities they are doing. People ask what’s the difference between a middle school athlete and a high school athlete in terms of their training and what types of things they do.  With a middle school athlete lots of times they haven’t gone through their puberty phase of development so they won’t have the testosterone in the males to build muscle mass or muscle girth so when we’re building strength in the weight room we’re not really looking for hypertrophy of muscle in the middle school kids. What we’re trying to do is develop neuro coordination. When we get them on the weight machines with middle school kids we focus on higher reps lower weights. What that allows for some of the middle school kids who have never lifted before it helps their nervous system process that movement and helps them fire quicker so that when they get into a sport when they start participating in an activity, they get more rapid reaction times and quicker reactions on the field. What we really see is not so much a muscle mass development but more of a neuro development or coordination increase. So you won’t see many middle school athletes doing one rep max lifts or heavy lifts with only three or four reps. What you’ll see with middle school athletes when they’re in the weight room or what you should see is more of the three sets of 10 or three sets of 12 with lighter weight focusing on their form, focusing a bit more on machine-based lifts right off the bat to make sure they are building strength without having to worry about keeping things in the right control with the free weights and then gradually progressing to the free weights in that range. Those are some of the main conceptions with middle school athletes in terms of what we should be looking for when we start middle school athletes in a program.