Starting Strength, 3rd Edition - Mark Rippetoe [210]
Barbell Training for Kids
A whole lot of people are under the erroneous impression that weight training is harmful for younger athletes, specifically the pre-pubescent population. Pediatricians are a wonderful group of folks as a whole, but very often they are woefully uninformed regarding the data pertaining to the injury rates of various sports activities. They may also be reluctant to apply some basic logic to an analysis of those numbers.
Table 8-2 lists the injury rates of various sports. Note that organized weightlifting activities, at 0.0012 injuries per 100 participation hours, is about 5100 times safer than everyone’s favorite organized children’s sport, soccer, at 6.2 injuries per 100 player hours. Gym class, at 0.18, is more dangerous than supervised weight training. Yet it is still common for medical professionals to advise against weight training for kids. The most cursory glance at the actual data renders this recommendation foolishness.
Table 8-2. Injury rates per 100 participation hours in various sports. From Hamill, B. “Relative Safety of Weightlifting and Weight Training,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 8(1):53-57, 1994.
So why does this mythology persist, and how did it get started? Most often cited as the primary concern is the chance of epiphyseal fracture that damages the growth plate, leading to growth asymmetry in the affected appendage. The entire body of the sports medicine literature contains six reports of growth-plate fractures that occurred in kids and were associated with weight training; none of these reports were detailed enough to determine whether the injury occurred under the bar (or if there even was a bar), occurred as the result of a fall due to faulty technique or improper instruction, or occurred as the result of injudicious loading. And even in these six isolated examples, none of the kids subsequently displayed any long-term effects that would indicate that a growth-plate injury does not heal just like any other injury. You know this yourself because fractures involving joints are common in kids, and the world is not crawling with roving gangs of asymmetrically-armed or -legged people seeking revenge for their misfortune.
The most intensely silly argument of all is that weight training stunts a kid’s growth. But hauling hay does not? Such nonsense is not really worthy of response. Not only does weight training at a young age not harm developing bones and joints, but it produces thicker, more durable articular cartilage surfaces that persist into adulthood, and likely contributes to long-term joint health. The mechanical and biological conditions produced by full-ROM barbell training affect the skeletal components of both adults and children in a positive way (Carter, Dennis R. and Gary S. Beaupré, Skeletal Function and Form, Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Here’s the bottom line: weight training is precisely scalable to the age and ability of the individual lifter. Soccer is not. We have 11-pound bars – or even broomsticks – for kids to start lifting with, but a full-speed collision on the field with another 80-pound kid is an inherently unscalable event. This logic also applies to every group of people who might be viewed as a “special population” – the frail elderly, people with skeletal and muscular disease, the completely sedentary, the morbidly obese, distance runners, and the lazy. Note that women are not listed as a special population: they are half of the population. Anyone who claims that women are so different in their physiological response to exercise that the principles of basic barbell training do not apply to them is thinking either irrationally or commercially.