Despite studies in the 1970’s that led many to believe that exercise targeted at building muscle was actually bad for children’s physical development, new evidence strongly indicates that resistance training is actually beneficial for kids of all ages. The new study, published in Pediatrics, found that, almost without exception, children and teens found physical benefits in properly supervised weight training.
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 had gathered data on boys and girls from six to eighteen. While older children, not surprisingly, gained more strength from the exercising, all children got stronger. While this conclusion is a reversal on common beliefs that children don’t actually get stronger with weight training, experts in the field are in agreement.
“We’ve worked with kindergartners, having them just use balloons and dowels” as strength training tools, “and found that they developed strength increases,” Dr. Faigenbaum, a widely acknowledged expert on the topic of youth strength training told the New York Times.
Children don’t build muscle mass from strength training, the way adults do. Instead their strength gains seem to be neurological changes. Basically, strength training makes their muscles work more efficiently. This is part of why strength training for kids may be so important, according to researchers and experts.
“We are urban dwellers stuck in hunter-gatherer bodies,” Lyle Micheli, M.D., the director of sports medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston and professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard University, as well as a co-author, with Dr. Faigenbaum, of the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s 2009 position paper about children and resistance training, told the Times. “That’s true for children as well as adults. There was a time when children ‘weight trained’ by carrying milk pails and helping around the farm. Now few children, even young athletes, get sufficient activity. If a kid sits in class or in front of a screen for hours and then you throw them out onto the soccer field or basketball court, they don’t have the tissue strength to withstand the forces involved in their sports. That can contribute to injury.”
So, with proper supervision to make sure they don’t over do it or hurt themselves, strength training may actually be great for youngsters, particularly athletes who wish to avoid injury. It also offers the potential of some good, and healthy, quality time for adults who can work out with their kids.
