How Old Do You Need To Be To Start Strength Training?

We have been told in the past that kids shouldn’t be lifting heavy weights. We’ve had a rough guideline for young kids that they really shouldn’t be doing any sort of formal strength training before puberty / teenage years. We’ve often cited that the risk is too high for injury or that kids can damage their growth plates. I still hear this pretty consistently from parents of young athletes.

In truth, there is very little evidence to support the idea that strength training will harm growth. If that were true, we would have to tell kids to stop running and playing as well. I don’t know any young kids who can lift three times their bodyweight. Yet if we look here, going for a run puts up to 3x bodyweight forces into our joints. Jumping up to 7x our bodyweight. A normal, healthy sport like gymnastics can produce up to 11x bodyweight forces. The math doesn’t add up. A typical, controlled weight lifting session would probably put .5-2x bodyweight forces into a child’s joints and that is “dangerous”, but jumping and running and sport all “safe” despite having significantly higher stress. Do we see the contradiction here?

Young kids are likely to be putting more stress on their joints from normal activities like sport and play than they are with weightlifting. Furthermore, more stress is not a bad thing. Stress is ultimately what builds us stronger and more capable. It’s the dosage that matters. The same way we wouldn’t introduce a track athlete to running with marathon distances, we would never introduce ridiculously heavy weights into a person’s programming until they’ve earned it over many many years. The same for adults.

Strength training offers so much value for the health of our bones, muscles, tendons, cartilage, nervous system; it helps with performance and injury prevention. It’s probably time to start rethinking the idea that strength training at a young age is dangerous, and instead look at the best ways to introduce appropriate training to the younger generation. Very young kids would probably benefit more from learning how to control their bodies in space, do more jump, sprint and agility training and build strength through more fun activities rather than barbells and dumbbells. But these are just tools to gain a mechanical advantage, and they shouldn’t be seen as these scary objects. If a child is both physically and emotionally mature enough to use tools that could help them improve, why wouldn’t we want to utilize them? Our problem is the perception that they are dangerous. The truth is that they are not appropriate for many adults just starting out either. But for the kids that are a little more advanced or mature, we are probably holding them back from reaching their potential. We should let the trainers help to determine who is ready and who is not.