About

Who writes this

Scott Bain

I teach PE and lead the athlete development programme at an international school in Germany, where I work with teenage athletes every week: testing them, programming for them, and answering the same questions from their parents and coaches that this site is built around.

I trained in sports science, with a Bachelor of Physical Education majoring in exercise prescription, and built and taught IB Sports, Exercise and Health Science for years. I've coached for twenty years, from under-10s through to senior men's level. I played rugby and cricket to representative level in New Zealand, was a player-coach in the German Bundesliga, and represented Germany at touch rugby. I've been the kid on the bench and the coach deciding who sits on it.

The site is run from a school programme, but it isn't the school's, and nothing here is the school's position.

Why it exists

Most of what reaches parents and teenage athletes about training, sleep, selection and growth is either folklore passed down from coach to coach, or content built to sell something. The research is better than that, but it's hard to find, hard to read, and often reported from the abstract by people who stopped there.

So this site does the reading.

The rules

• Every paper is read in full before a page is written. Not the abstract, not the press release.
• Every page says how strong the evidence is. Where the study is small, old, adult-only or male-only, the page says so.
• Where the honest answer is "we don't know", that's the answer.
• The findings are averages across many athletes. Every page says where that matters for one.
• If I get something wrong, email me and I'll fix the page and say what changed.

The daily posts

The same findings, cut to a few seconds, go out daily on Instagram and TikTok as @youthathlete, aimed at the athletes themselves. The site is the long version.