BIO-BANDING

Why is Bio-Banding important?

As children experience maturational events (puberty) at different ages, their physical, social, and psychological differences are likely to be extremely varied, even amongst children with the same chronological age [1]. In addition, the timing of maturation has important implications for training, competition, and talent identification. As a result, bio-banding could be a suitable way of addressing the issues in each of the following categories.

1. Training
2. Competition
3. Talent identification

Training

Because physical attributes observed in youth athletes are considered to be poor predictors of success at the adult level [18], emerging evidence suggests that bio-banding, as a complement to age-group competition, can benefit both early- and late-maturing athletes in academy soccer [1]. In terms of youth training, all fitness attributes are responsive to training stimuli at all ages, although some physical qualities (e.g. speed) may be more sensitive to adaptation at particular times of maturation (e.g. pre-peak height velocity) [19].

It is important to manage and supervise each athlete’s training programme according to their maturation status and present skills. Moreover, the growth spurt is a period of elevated risk for overuse injuries, particularly Osgood-Schlatter disease. Therefore, the training load and the athlete’s health needs to be closely monitored during the growth spurt to avoid overuse injuries [20, 21]. Furthermore, as childhood and adolescence are periods in which motor skills are developed in abundance, it is therefore important for young athletes to focus their attention on their technical and tactical skills at this stage; both for their learning, and for their future performance [22].

Competition

Competition is an integral component of youth sports programmes, where individual differences in growth and maturation have shown to impact player performance and the development of young athletes [1]. In this sense, young athletes who mature in advance (i.e. early-maturers) may experience a competitive advantage in some sports because of their physical size and athleticism, thus being perceived as better [23]. For example, imagine an under-14 male rugby match in which one team’s average height and weight were 160cm and 50kg (i.e. early-maturers), whilst the other teams were 153cm and 44kg (i.e. late-maturers), respectively. This scenario may encourage the early-developers to use their physical advantage and neglect their technical and tactical skills [3].

This temporary advantage and success will also, in many cases, carry less challenging experiences, which, in turn, may stagnate the young athlete’s development. It is for this reason that the early-developing athlete may often be badly prepared for future competition against physically-matched opponents [1].

Talent identification

It is also important to acknowledge the tremendous effect that maturation has on the identification and selection processes in sport. For example, late-developers have shown to be 10-times less likely to be retained by elite soccer academies (e.g. Manchester United Football Club and the Aspire Academy) [9].

In this context, some evidence suggests that bio-banding may provide a useful solution for such a problem by decreasing the impact of the relative age effect [24]. This would, therefore, help institutions and clubs to retain talented athletes that may otherwise ‘slip through the net’. Finally, the current selection strategies that favour athletes based on attributes that are not fully developed until adulthood (e.g. size and strength), may have negative long-term effects on the athlete’s psycho-social development, in addition to their sporting success.