Is Weight Training Stunting Growth in Youth Athletes?

I was recently asked the question “is my child too young to be working out.”  This a valid question as for years we had been hearing that working out before a child hits puberty can stunt their growth, in fact many old school doctors and therapists who have not been exposed to the new research may not know that it even exists.

 

So today I thought I would dive a little into the evidence and explain why stunting a child’s growth via working out has been proven to be a misconception that started many years ago.  As medical experts began to complete more studies on the topic doctors began to find that not only is weight training safe for kids it is actually beneficial and even essential.

 

Check out this excerpt below from a 2011 NY Times article:

 

2010 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics published a review  where “researchers with the Institute of Training Science and Sports Informatics in Cologne, Germany, analyzed 60 years’ worth of studies of children and weightlifting. The studies covered boys and girls from age 6 to 18. The researchers found that, almost without exception, children and adolescents benefited from weight training.”

 

What they found is that pre-pubescent children rarely packed on bulk (which was the reason many people feared stunting their growth in the first place).  However the majority of their strength gains generally resulted in neurological changes.  In other words their nervous system became much more effective at controlling their body.

 

There are other studies that show children have developed a significant increase in motor-unit activation within their muscles after weight training. A motor unit consists of a single neuron and all of the muscle cells that it controls. When more motor units fire, a muscle contracts more efficiently. So, in essence, strength training in children seems to liberate the innate strength of the muscle, to activate the power that has been in abeyance, unused. (Read full article here)

 

We have all seen the kid, who as they begin to grow starts to look uncoordinated in their own body.  This often results in parents saying they used to be really fast and athletic but now they are tripping over their own feet.  At the same time it’s common for the some nagging knee or ankle pain to begin to bother the child.

 

One of the most common reasons we see these issues is because as children begin to really grow they start to develop muscles that they do not even know how to use or even how to activate.  They are only using certain ones that they can and know how to.  This leads to them developing muscular imbalances and restrictions which further reduce their performance down the road.

 

The older they get the longer it takes to fix these imbalances

 

We have had numerous young athletes that we have helped take their game to the next level just by fixing these issues, teaching them how to activate and use the muscles they have along with fixing their movement patterns.  None of these things would be possible without introducing them to weight training.

 

We also see these same athletes be able to go on and compete at an extremely high level as they get older with them being leaps and bounds ahead of their team mates and opponents who spent the last few years sitting on the couch playing video games.

If you are interested in reading more on the topic check out a couple of the reviews published in pubmed:

Weight training in youth-growth, maturation, and safety: an evidence-based review

Resistance training, skeletal muscle and growth