Resistance Training and Youth: What You Need to Know
You’ve heard it before: young kids shouldn’t lift weights because resistance training will damage their growth plates and stunt their growth. Where did this come from, and how true is it? Glad you asked because today we’re going to dive into the science behind it, and get rid of all the misinformation that gets parroted by morons who have no idea what they’re talking about. This is a topic that I get pretty passionate about, not only because of the misinformation that gets spread because of it, but because you’re legitimately leaving kids in a vulnerable position when they play sports if you buy into the notion that they shouldn’t be resistance training.
What is Resistance Training?
Resistance training comes in many different forms. Lifting weights, running, climbing, skipping, crawling, bodyweight movements, and even playing your sport are all forms of resistance training (gravity is resistance too!). The possibilities of what we can classify as resistance training is almost limitless, however the first one on the list gets a bad rap.
The notion that weight training is inherently dangerous comes from a lack of understanding, and visions of young kids performing the power lifts, olympic lifts and competing in strongman events. Outside of some coaches who have no idea what they’re doing, your kids will not be exposed to this level of movement intensity until their training age is MUCH higher, so you should rest assured that that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Resistance training, or strength training, is defined by wikipedia (I know, terrible source but they did a good job here) as:
The performance of physical exercises which are designed to improve strength and endurance. It is often associated with the use of weights. It can also incorporate a variety of training techniques such as calisthenics, isometrics, and plyometrics
Running is resistance training, wall sits are resistance training, climbing on a jungle gym is resistance training as are climbing on the monkey bars, skating on the ice is resistance training, kicking a soccer ball and lifting weights are all resistance training. What sets apart weight training from the others that has given it such a bad rap when it comes to kids though? In my mind there’s two reasons:
You can see the actual resistance and quantify it. We have an understanding of just how much external resistance is being applied to us, so we can better understand the danger associated with it when compared to a sprint or a jump.
A “study” produced during WWII Japanese concentration camps where they broke adolescent bones at the epiphyseal (growth) plate, and demonstrated that the end of the bone with the fracture ceased to continue growth. More on this in the next section.
Now, it’s understandable to be hesitant about weight training given this information. On the flip side of the coin though lies the fact that weight training is completely controllable. We can control every single variable in a controlled environment. From speed of movement, to the load of the resistance, to the time under tension, the movement itself and everything in-between, as strength coaches we control it all! Now compare that to the environment of athletic play: completely chaotic from a movement perspective, no idea how much force is being applied or accepted and shift/play times that are relatively unpredictable. Which sounds more dangerous to you?
The “Study” That Started It All
This is pretty heavy stuff but it’s worth mentioning where this thought process came from. WWII had a lot of egregious crimes against humanity, and the world is a better place due to the brave men and women from all over the world who fought against it. Here in the West we learn all about the fight on the Eastern front and the crimes against humanity that the Nazis performed in their concentration camps and ghettos. But there was an entire other front that I feel wasn’t touched on quite as much and that’s the battles on the Pacific front. Sure we learned about Pearl Harbor, Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett even starred in a blockbuster movie about it. But for all of the terrible things happening in the Nazi Concentration Camps with Dr. Mengele and his ilk, there were crimes just as bad happening in the Japanese Concentration Camps in China. This is where we learned how to regenerate dead tissue from frostbite. We learned this because the Japanese would actually freeze the limbs of the Chinese prisoners and then stick their frozen appendages in various temperatures of water to see if there was any way to regenerate the tissue. These doctors who would typically be bound by ethics no longer had to be, because they were just “prisoners” so it didn’t matter.
Another study performed was to see how much force it would take to break various bones in both adults and children. This is horrific and I can’t imagine being in this “lab” performing these experiments on human beings. It takes a truly depraved individual to do this and be able to lay your head down at night and fall asleep with a clean conscious. That aside, they also wanted to know what would happen if the epiphyseal plates of adolescents were fractured. What they hoped to gain from this information is beyond me but they were able to conclude that yes, fracturing the epiphyseal plates will in fact cause the bone to cease growing on that end of the bone.
This information was then used to hypothesize that any damage to the growth plate would end in a stunting of growth of that bone for the child, and rightfully so as they had done with experiments already. This hypothesis was then used to say that because weight training involves force production and impact at the joints (the growth plates are at the ends of the bones near the joints), weight training could stunt growth for adolescent trainees. Now this is quite the jump, and it was NEVER settled science but that didn’t stop physicians from telling people not to let their kids lift weights because it would stunt their growth and they’d never reach their full height potential. That’s pretty scary to hear as a parent, and it led to parents opting out of weight training altogether for their children. This study wasn’t created using any kind of science, and there was never any follow up because any study like this would be COMPLETELY unethical. So the lie just perpetuated itself over the years. It’s been 80 almost years and we now KNOW the science, but this stupid myth just won’t die.
Resistance Training Actually HELPS with Bone Growth
Yup! You heard that right. Resistance training actually helps with bone growth and bone density in adolescent athletes. A study in 1994 from the American Journal of Sports Medicine titled “Stimulation of bone growth through sports. A radiologic investigation of the upper extremities in professional tennis players” got the ball rolling by proving that external resistance training (swinging a racquet) can actually create a bone that’s both more dense and longer. Why does this happen?
There’s actually a few reasons for this. First off, resistance training increases growth hormone secretion. Growth hormone is an amino acid hormone in the body that signals other processes to happen that lead to, well growth. Secondly, the damage caused by resistance training also signals the body to come back better for the next time it’s exposed to this external resistance, and one of the ways it accomplishes this is by signaling the body to send more calcium to make the bone stronger and more dense. A byproduct of this process in adolescents who’s epiphyseal plates have yet to fuse, is not just density but GROWTH of the bone.
Resistance training not only doesn’t cause a stunting of growth in adolescent athletes, but it does the EXACT OPPOSITE in ensuring we grow to our full potential! Crazy right?! Stick around, there’s even more reason to allow your children to life weights and we’re going to go over all of them.
Contact in Youth Sports
Have you ever watched a Pop Warner football game, or been around the rink for a 14U travel hockey game? 2-3 minutes into the game and you’ll see how harsh of an environment it can be. Watching these games has always made me think “how are these kids NOT weight training?! It seems more dangerous to not lift weights and play this sport than weight training could ever be.” These sports are dangerous and unpredictable with a good amount of violence sprinkled in. Forget getting bigger/faster/stronger for performance, how do we prepare these kids to be resilient so they don’t end up hurt? The answer is resistance training!
Resistance training may be the only thing standing between your child and injury. From concussions to soft tissue and bone injury, resistance training is an unbelievably safe way to ensure your child has the best possible outcomes on the field on the field of play. And not just from a performance perspective, but from a staying on the field because they’re not hurt perspective.
Resistance training helps prepare the athlete both mentally and physically for the stressors they’ll see on the field. It teaches them to both produce and accept more force while strengthening the muscles, bones and tendons so they can both perform and stay resilient on the field of play. The question isn’t “why should we weight train” it’s “why aren’t we weight training??”
I Don’t Wanna Look Like Arnold Though
When you think about weight training I’m sure you have visions of Arnold in Pumping Iron bench pressing and doing Arnold Presses in an effort to get as big and strong as humanly possible. We’ve been conditioned to think this way because this is what the medias shows us when they talk about weight training. This type of training is one of the many forms of resistance training and it’s called bodybuilding, and the good news is that you more than likely won’t have the genetics and drugs available to you that Arnold had, so you’ll never have to worry about looking like him. You see, there are MANY disciplines of strength/weight training and they’re all very different in both practice and in outcome. Here’s a list of some of them:
Bodybuilding
High volume/moderate intensity training geared towards growth of the muscle cell. The goal is to be as big as possible, and contrary to popular belief strength is fairly low on the totem pole.
Crossfit
High volume/low intensity lifting to be “fit”. There’s a lot of downfalls with CrossFit, lack of a progressive overload being the biggest one. The goal of CrossFit is to be better at CrossFit, and let’s just say that the pros you see on TV don’t actually CrossFit to get ready to compete.
Powerlifting
High Intensity/low volume training designed to get better at the big three lifts: the squat, bench press and the deadlift.
Strongman
High volume/high intensity training. This type of training is incredibly difficult, and my hat’s off to each and every competitor who puts in the effort to get better at it whether they end up on the podium or not.
Functional Training
This type of training is defined as exercises that help with your everyday life. In practice it really isn’t though. The use of balance modalities and things better left in the rehab setting don’t allow for any real intensity of load, which leads to not really getting better at anything.
Performance Training
Training to become more athletic and efficient in movement. Performance training pulls just a little bit from all the other practices and allows for an environment where the athlete can become more resilient, bigger, faster, stronger AND a better mover.
This stigma that weight training carries is honestly pretty unwarranted. When you think about weight training as a method for training to perform better at your sport, try to envision a more rounded athlete, and not just a meat head grunting while bench pressing.
Confidence is Key!
I’ve seen it in real time over and over again. NOTHING can increase a child’s confidence on the field (and in general) like getting proficient at a movement, getting a little bigger, or adding a little bit of weight to a movement in the gym. It’s true that most kids lack the hormonal capacity to gain any real size until they’re deep into puberty, but they can absolutely get stronger and this strength is like a confidence magnet!
It’s also a great way to teach short term sacrifice for long term gain. They learn to be uncomfortable and suffer during a set or session, and then reap the benefits of increased strength or endurance. It’s honestly amazing to watch and be able to have a hand in helping guide them to a better and more confident self. Weight training 100% beyond any shadow of a doubt does this, and while I am not a fan of using weight training or training in general as a way to increase “mental toughness” (the studies show it doesn’t work and can lead to undesired outcomes including death), I am a fan of using it as a tool to increase confidence.
Learning Movement Patterns and Good Movement Cues
One thing that’s great about having a well-versed strength and conditioning coach at your disposal is their ability to teach you how to move. From the primal movement patterns to jumping/landing, lateral, linear and multidirectional movement a good strength coach can help to engrain these proper patterns.
This particular thing is somewhat of a double edged sword though. On one hand, a good strength can use this resistance training to cue and engrain proper movement. On the other hand a bad one can really mess up your ability to move and even cause injury on the field of play. This is due to two things: repetition and load. Using resistance in movement can help to further engrain these proper movement patterns, OR it can further engrain terrible movement patterns. Adding any load to a movement pattern will act much like an accelerant to a fire. It will force your body to adapt quicker to the movement, and if the load is too high it will cause you to compensate in places AND it will engrain this terrible movement pattern. So make sure you find a good coach!
Another way resistance training can help with learning to be a better mover is that it can act like a cue for positioning. Here’s an example:
I have a young athlete who I’ve been working with on developing better movement patterns. We’re still pretty early in our training so we haven’t added any external resistance yet. We’ve been working on the squat and no matter what I do I cannot get her to maintain a rigid torso. Her chest keeps falling as she drops her hips to perform the squat. How can I change this when communication of what I need her to do isn’t doing the trick? Enter: external resistance. I hand her a 15lb dumbbell to hold at chest height just under her chin. And like magic as she drops her hips, she keeps her chest up and thus maintains a rigid torso. Why did this happen? She heard what I needed her to do but just couldn’t do it. The answer is that the external resistance is a movement cue for her. If she doesn’t keep her chest up and stay rigid, she’s going to fall forward. Without saying a word she now understands her body positioning better, and can perform an almost textbook squat. This 15lbs isn’t overwhelming, it isn’t overly heavy, but its just enough to cue her into proper position! Adding resistance has led her to be a more efficient mover, which she can take with her onto the field of play. Big win!
Weight training can be a great tool in creating movement competency and efficiency when done properly.
In Conclusion…
Only you can make the decision as to whether or not weight training is right for you, or your child. All I can tell you is that we have plenty of data to point to the fact that weight training has nothing but positive benefits when performed under the supervision of a qualified professional in a proper environment.
