Why the Program Eases Off in May

The email that generates the most confused replies arrives in the third week of March.

The season has started, the games are real, and the daily session just dropped from forty-five minutes to twenty. Parents reasonably wonder whether something broke.

Nothing broke. That's the design, and the reasoning behind it is the same reasoning that every college and professional program uses — it just looks strange when it turns up in a family's inbox.

The short version

In-season, the games are the training. A Saturday with two games, plus two team practices, is already a substantial week of load for your young athlete. Home sessions get shorter and sharper so that the total stays sane.

The home work in-season becomes maintenance and sharpening: hands, stance, a bit of footwork, mental routine, recovery. Building happens in the winter and the summer, when the games aren't taking anything.

Adding volume on top of a competition season is the most common way a good April turns into a hurt May.

The year, phase by phase

January and February — pre-season. Volume climbs. Stance is rebuilt from scratch, conditioning goes in, hands get sharpened. This is where the physical base for the season is laid, indoors, usually in bad light. Winter is the real building window and almost nobody uses it.

March to mid-May — school season. Sessions get short. The purpose shifts from building to maintaining and to game preparation: quality over quantity, mental routine, recovery between games. His legs belong to his team now.

June — deload. Deliberately light, shorter emails, less asked. After five months of competition, this is when the body actually catches up. It's the phase families most often skip and most need.

July and August — off-season build, then peak. The biggest sessions of the year for an athlete without a summer team; maintenance for one who's playing tournaments. Both versions are written into the same emails, because both athletes are reading them.

September to November — fall multi-sport. Home volume comes down so another sport can have him. Skill refinement, reaction work, film, and the start of strength work at the older grades.

December — finish and test. Retesting what changed over the year, and closing it out.

And one full rest day every week, all year, in every grade.

Why this is not going easy

Adaptation happens during recovery, not during work. Training is the stimulus; the improvement arrives while he's resting. A program with no valleys provides plenty of stimulus and not enough of the thing that converts it.

Load is cumulative and invisible. A parent sees the forty-five-minute home session and counts that. The body counts practices, games, warm-ups, the walk-through, school PE, and the tournament weekend, all of it. In-season, the home session is the only piece anybody controls, so it's the piece that flexes.

Competition is high-intensity by nature. A game is not a light activity for your kid. Concentration, repeated explosive movement, and impact, for an hour, with a number attached to his performance. Four of those in a weekend is a serious dose, and it's worth understanding what a tournament actually costs him.

And the governing bodies say so. USA Lacrosse asks clubs directly to periodise training and rest in order to reduce overuse injury and burnout. Pediatric guidance asks for a day off every week and months off every year. A program that ran flat-out year-round would be ignoring both.

Suggestions on what you can do

Take the shorter session at face value. It isn't a lighter week because he's doing well or because the program ran out of material. It's the plan.

Protect the rest day hardest in-season. That's when it's most tempting to fill and most valuable to keep.

Watch the total, not the session. Three practices, two games and a home session is a full week for your goalie. Adding a private lesson on Sunday is how families quietly exceed what a thirteen-year-old can absorb.

Use in-season home time on the small things. Hands, stance, routine, recovery. Nothing heavy, nothing new.

And let June be June. A deload week that gets filled with catch-up training is the most self-defeating thing in the calendar, and it's the one families do most often.

By age: third and fourth grade, in-season home work is almost nothing and that's correct. Fifth and sixth, fifteen to twenty-five minutes in-season, with the building saved for winter and summer. Seventh and eighth, load management starts to matter for real, because the volume steps up and the body is growing. Ninth and tenth, school season plus lifting is already a full week — the in-season home session is maintenance only. Eleventh and twelfth, it's micro-dosed work and targeted recovery, and by then he should be able to tell you which he needs.

A few things worth avoiding

Try not to add training because he had a bad game. A bad Saturday in April is almost never a volume problem, and responding to it with more work is how a slump becomes an injury.

Go easy on the extra tournament in the middle of the school season. It's the single biggest load spike available and it lands at the worst point in the year.

Try not to skip the deload because he seems fine. Fine in June is often five months of accumulated fatigue that hasn't surfaced yet.

And don't let the winter and summer building windows go unused. Those are the phases where the improvement actually happens, and a goalie who trains hard in-season and coasts in December has it exactly backwards.

The version worth remembering

The season is when a goalie spends what he built. The winter and summer are when he builds it.

So the program gets lighter in May because that's what the year is supposed to look like — and the shortest sessions of the year land in the middle of the most intense weeks of it, on purpose.

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The whole program is periodised by phase, and every email says which phase the athlete is in and why the session looks the way it does. Three real days of a fifth-grade week are open on the site, no signup. Take a look at the free week.

Coach Greg — LAX Goalie Hub

General information from a coach, not medical advice. Training load for a growing athlete is individual — if you have concerns about fatigue, pain or injury, talk to a qualified clinician who can examine your athlete.