If you are sending your teenage boy to a personal trainer /strength coach and the coach is having your kid perform "gimmicky" exercises (Standing on a ball, endless rotator cuff exercises, walking around with dumbells over their heads, ladder drills, a bunch of machine work, prelifting stretching), take your kid and leave. You don't need all that bullshit. There is only so much time with the kid. Get the most bang for your buck. No foam rolling and a bunch of useless shit. "A" skips are not the proper warmup for a squat. Just have the lifter do light squats to warm up for the squat. Ridiculous all these damn warmups! Be specific to the activity you are going to perform.
It's relatively simple to train a beginning lifter:
Teach them impeccable form in all the lifts that are in the program.
Include these exercises in the program: Squats, Deadlifts, Press, Bench Press, Bent rows. Assistance exercises can include pushups, dips (not too deep), chins, lateral raises, one arm rows, and curls and various dumbell presses. There are more than can be substituted for those lifts, but if the kid just did those lifts, they would be fine. In fact, the kid could get away with not doing a bunch of assistance work or maybe not at all, but I include it because: A) I think the assistance lifts make the big lifts stronger B) It makes the kid bigger (bodyweight) C)It makes them look good. That last one may give some pause, but if you understand the psyche of a young lifter, and I have trained a mess of them, they want to have big muscles. Also, kids who want to get big, love that pumped up feeling, hence the higher reps on some assistance work.
I have an online client, 14 year old kid that I am training. In 6 months, he has gained 35 pounds of bodyweight. His squat and bench and deadlift have gone up 70, 40 and 60 pounds, respectfully. He never misses a session. He sends me videos of all his top lifts, then makes adjustments that I recommend. I trained him without using percentages at first, and then when he had been with me 6-8 weeks or so, we did a one rep max in the squat, bench and deadlift. After that, I used percentages of his one rep max to cycle his training. Most all of the big lifts are 2-5 reps. After around rep number 5, form starts to break down. Always better to perform ten sets of three versus three sets of ten. On the assistance exercises, he should pyramid up until the last set is hard but form is kept.
Here is one week of his exact program:
Day 1
