MatchFit Movement

01/11/2026

Developing the young athlete also means supporting the parent behind them.

This week we’ve added another new resource to our MatchFit Members’ Parents’ Corner:

😴 The Importance of Sleep: Is your child getting enough?

We spend a lot of time thinking about training — but development doesn’t only happen while your child is exercising.

Sleep, nutrition, recovery, growth and maturation, and how we organise increasingly busy sporting weeks all influence a young athlete’s development.

That’s why MatchFit Membership is about more than the S&C session.

Alongside developing strength, movement, speed and athleticism, we’re continuing to build resources that help parents better understand and support the young person behind the athlete.

Not a MatchFit Member? You can get a flavour of our approach for FREE.

Our MatchFit Parents Toolkit includes:

📅 Weekly Athlete Planner — map out your child’s PE, training, matches and S&C and start looking at their week as a whole.

📈 Growth & maturation guidance — understand why two children of the same age can be at very different stages of physical development.

🎓 Parent education — practical information to help you make more informed decisions around your child’s sport and development.

🧭 Programme Finder — helping identify an appropriate starting point for your child’s physical development.

It’s completely free and designed to give parents practical tools they can actually use.

👉 Want access? Comment TOOLKIT below and I’ll send you the link.

Developing young athletes. Supporting the parents behind them. 💪

28/10/2026

Girls shouldn’t have to wait until they’re injured before physical preparation becomes a priority.

As girls move through adolescence, the risk of serious knee injuries — including ACL injury — becomes an increasingly important consideration in many sports.

We can’t eliminate that risk.

But we can influence some of the factors that contribute to it.

That’s why physical preparation matters.

💪 Build strength
⚡ Develop the ability to produce and absorb force
🏃‍♀️ Practise accelerating and changing direction
⬆️ Jump and land regularly
🔁 Build these qualities consistently over time

This isn’t about making girls fearful of movement or avoiding demanding activities.

It’s about preparing them for those demands.

And importantly, this work shouldn’t begin when something hurts.

It should be part of developing the young athlete in the first place.

Don’t avoid the demand. Prepare for it.

Want to understand more about your child’s current physical development?

Comment ASSESS and I’ll send you details of our FREE MatchFit Athletic Assessment. 👇

27/10/2026

Some years ago, I wrote this article for Complimentary Training in relation to managing a squad in a professional football club: starters; bench players; and reserves / U21s.

Today, the underlying principles still stand up.

The management of workload and scheduling of training to target specific outcomes is central to the MatchFit Movement. The difference is that we exist to support parents with research-led information and guidance regarding workload and athletic development training to support their child’s progress.

Planning the In-Season Microcycle in Soccer, Part 2: Mark Williams Case Study

Mark Williams and his staff tried using their regeneration methods on Monday after a Saturday game. The players still weren’t optimally recovered for Tuesday’s training.

So they changed the approach. Monday became light training to get players moving again. For their squad, this worked better than pool-based or off-feet recovery, especially since much of the weekly loading happens on Tuesday: varied-sized games, supplementary running where needed, and autoregulated strength work, adjusted by staff observation.

Thursday often starts with a speed-strength primer before football, and it’s also the day of the weekly vertical jump. It works well because players are motivated to give maximal effort with Saturday’s squad selection approaching. They’ve used wellness questionnaires too, but the jump is their most favored tool.

They also try to keep the weekly routine consistent. Players know what to expect, can plan their lives outside training, and bring the appropriate intensity to each session. Mark sees this as reflecting the human side of the players.

The article includes Mark’s Excel microcycle template. I’ve also made the blank template available to non-members.

If you’ve developed your own solutions for one-game or two-game weeks, send them over. I’ll gladly publish them as part of this series.

Read the article: https://complementarytraining.com/planning-the-in-season-microcycle-in-soccerpart-2-mark-williams-case-study/

25/10/2026

🏀 Back with Basketball England’s Aspire parents and guardians on Monday evening — this time discussing growth, maturation and workload management in young basketball players.

This is an area I’m particularly passionate about because growing athletes aren’t simply smaller versions of adults.

During adolescence, rapid changes in height, body mass, strength and coordination can influence how a young athlete moves, performs and responds to training.

Periods of rapid growth can also coincide with increased vulnerability to certain injuries, making it particularly important that we understand what is happening to the developing athlete and manage their training appropriately.

At the same time, many young players are trying to balance:

🏀 Club and talent pathway basketball
🏫 School sport and PE
💪 Strength & conditioning
🏆 Games and tournaments
😴 Recovery, sleep and everything else that comes with being a teenager

The answer isn’t to stop young athletes doing things or wrap them in cotton wool.

It’s about understanding the demands being placed upon them, their current capacity to tolerate those demands, and how both can change as they grow.

That’s what we’ll be exploring on Monday evening, alongside practical ways parents can support their child’s development.

It’s also a topic that sits right at the heart of what we’re trying to do with MatchFit Movement:

Manage the demand. Build the capacity. Support the developing athlete. 💪

22/10/2026

I probably spend more time talking about how we should develop young athletes than explaining why I created MatchFit.

The reason is actually pretty simple.

I’ve spent much of my career working in strength & conditioning, youth athletic development, research and education — including supporting young athletes within national talent pathways.

But I’m also a parent.

And I don’t think access to good information about your child’s physical development should depend on whether they’re fortunate enough to be part of a talent pathway.

That’s why I created MatchFit.

To provide young athletes with high-quality, research-led physical preparation — but also to help parents navigate the bigger picture:

💪 Strength & physical development
📈 Growth & maturation
📅 Training load & busy sporting weeks
🥗 Nutrition, sleep & recovery
🏃 Long-term athletic development

Everything we do is guided by the research, practical experience, and one very simple question:

Would I use this with my own children?

If I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t recommend it for yours.

Developing young athletes. Supporting the parents behind them.

That’s what I want MatchFit to be. 💪

18/10/2026

🏀 Very much looking forward to presenting to the parents and guardians of Basketball England’s Aspire players tomorrow evening.

We’ll be exploring the importance of age-appropriate strength and conditioning in youth basketball, including how physical preparation can support athletic performance, reduce injury risk, and help young players navigate growth and maturation.

Importantly, we’ll also discuss why developing the athlete matters just as much as developing the basketball player.

It’s a message that underpins everything we’re trying to achieve at MatchFit Movement.

Sport develops the player. We still need to develop the athlete. 💪

Looking forward to sharing some practical insights that parents can use to better support their child’s long-term athletic development.

🏀 Basketball England Aspire Parent Webinar
📅 Monday 19 October | 7 pm

14/10/2026

🥛 Think of your child’s physical capacity like a glass.

Every session adds something.

PE. School sport. Club training. Matches. Tournaments.

Individually, none of those things necessarily has to be a problem.

But if we keep adding load without enough opportunity to recover and adapt, eventually we can exceed what the body is currently able to tolerate.

And importantly, that doesn’t mean the answer is simply to do less.

We can also increase the size of the glass.

Appropriate strength training, physical preparation and progressive exposure to load can help young athletes build greater physical capacity over time.

So when I talk about managing workload, I’m not talking about wrapping children in cotton wool.

I’m talking about finding the right balance between:

what we ask the body to tolerate

and

what we’re doing to help it tolerate more.

That’s why the whole week matters.

📅 Manage the demand. Build the capacity. Allow time to recover, grow and adapt.

👉 Want to get a clearer picture of your child’s week?

Download the FREE MatchFit Parents Toolkit, including Planner Lite, to map their weekly sport and activity and start making more informed decisions about where training, S&C and recovery fit.

🔗 Get the free Parents Toolkit via the link in our bio.

MatchFit Members also have access to Dashboard Pro for more detailed weekly planning and insights.

07/10/2026

📈 Your child might tolerate a high physical load once. But that doesn’t mean they can tolerate it repeatedly.

PE. School sport. Club training. Matches. Tournaments.

For many young athletes, the week can become very busy, very quickly.

And the issue isn’t necessarily any one of those sessions.

It’s the accumulation of load across the whole week.

The magnitude of the load matters.
How frequently it’s repeated matters.
And so does the opportunity the body has to recover, grow and adapt.

But the answer isn’t simply to do less.

We also need to build the young athlete’s capacity to tolerate the demands of their sport.

That means finding space for appropriate strength & conditioning alongside sport — not simply adding another hard session to an already crowded week.

💪 Build strength and physical capacity.
📅 Organise demanding sessions intelligently.
🌱 Protect opportunities for rest, recovery and growth.

This is why I encourage parents to stop looking at individual sessions in isolation and start looking at the whole week.

Manage the demand. Build the capacity.

👉 Want to see what your child’s week actually looks like?

Download the FREE MatchFit Parents Toolkit, including Planner Lite, to map their weekly sport and activity and start making more informed decisions about where training, S&C and recovery fit.

🔗 Get the free Parents Toolkit via the link in our bio.

MatchFit Members also have access to Dashboard Pro for more detailed weekly planning and insights

04/10/2026

⚠️ What does your daughter’s current strategy look like to reduce her risk of a non-contact ACL injury?

For many young female athletes, the answer may simply be… there isn’t one.

And ACL risk reduction is more complex than simply telling an athlete:

“Don’t let your knee collapse in.”

Research examining non-contact ACL injury mechanisms suggests that large compressive forces travelling through the leg may play an important role, alongside factors including knee valgus, quadriceps loading and whole-body positioning.

That means preparing young athletes needs to go beyond simply trying to control what the knee looks like.

We should be developing:

⚡ Effective movement mechanics
💪 Strength and physical capacity
🦵 Landing and deceleration ability
↔️ Change-of-direction competency
🧠 Neuromuscular control
📈 The ability to tolerate and manage high forces

No programme can eliminate the risk of an ACL injury.

But we can better prepare young athletes for the forces and movement demands they’re exposed to in sport.

And importantly, this type of physical preparation doesn’t need to wait until something goes wrong.

Is your daughter currently getting this preparation?

If not, start with MatchFit.

Our in-person classes and online strength & conditioning programmes are designed specifically to help developing young athletes build strength, movement competency and physical capacity as they grow.

👉 Find the right MatchFit option for your daughter via the link in our bio.

You can’t eliminate the risk. But you can better prepare the athlete.