I was a reasonably high level sprinter in the 90s and also a winger for an adult rugby team. My sprint coach put me and my training partner, who was a decathlete, on a weight training linear progression starting at 16 years old (1994). It was only once a week, but it only had the squat (high bar), clean and bench press. Nothing else, and no deadlift unfortunately. We did 3 sets of 8 reps. The coach was conservative with adding weight so we probably could have progressed quicker, but he did tell us to eat. My training partner was bigger and stronger than me - a decathlete. The point is, it worked. At the end of two years when I went off to university I was still adding weight, although I had had a couple of resets, and much stronger.

As far as I am aware, my coach learnt the principles of linear progression from what was the AAA (amateur athletics association) and was a pretty common weight training strategy for sprinters at that time. I'm not sure if it is anymore.

I now train my own 16 year old son (for soccer now). I started off in his early teens with linear progression (just from what I learnt from two decades ago), but he stalled very early. That wasn't disappointing, at least he had ingrained the technique, as only children can. I then fell down the rabbit hole of functional fitness. You should see the crap I built up, yes, including a bosu ball. What a waste of time. We tried one thing for a few sessions, then something else. But he wasn't training. I have to admit, we had a lot of fun though.

We're now three weeks into the SS linear progression. My son went from 143 lbs at 5 foot 10 to 154 lbs in two weeks. It looks like it's all muscle, but obviously isn't.

He did a 155 lb squat today and 200 lb deadlift after three weeks from starting at the bar basically. Of course nothing to write home about, but he's still only 16 and after three weeks I'm quite pleased with it. Today was the first day that he progressed with smaller weights (1.25kg plates on either side for the bench press) and I've just ordered 0.5kg plates for future weeks.

Wish us luck. it would be great to connect.