Strength training for children is controversial. But it shouldn’t be. By now, most parents, coaches, and healthcare providers know it is safe and beneficial for children to strength train. This article describes 10 reasons why your child should be doing strength training exercises.
What is Strength Training for Children?
Before describing what strength training is, we should first define what we mean by children. Childhood is the developmental period from the end of infancy to the beginning of adolescence. Generally, children are girls or boys up to the age of 11 and 13 years, respectively. The ages are different because girls reach puberty about 2 years before boys.
Strength training is a method of exercise whereby an individual is working against a wide range of resistance loads to enhance health, fitness, and/or performance. Forms of resistance include the child’s own body weight, weight machines, free weights (barbells and dumbbells), elastic bands, and/or medicine balls.
The Benefits of Strength Training for Children
1. Enhanced Heart and Metabolic Function
Children with poor muscle strength and poor motor skills are less likely to gain competence and confidence in their physical abilities. This leads to low levels of physical activity and a sedentary lifestyle. These children then develop disease risk factors and experience adverse health outcomes. Strength training and high levels of physical activity improve insulin sensitivity and heart function in youth of all ages.
2. Improved Body Composition
Heavier adolescents are more than 2x as likely to be injured in sports and other physical activities compared with their peers. Aerobic exercise is typically prescribed for these children. However excess body fat and weight may hinder the performance of activities like jogging. This is due to a reduced ability to maintain postural stability and control during physical activities. Often, heavier children find greater success performing strength-based exercises than aerobic exercise.
3. Increased Muscular Strength
Improvements in strength during childhood are related to the development of the central nervous system. Strength training accelerates this development. Pre-puberty children cannot grow large muscles. After puberty, strength gains and muscle size are further enhanced by the body’s production of hormones, primarily testosterone. Stronger children are more physically active, healthier, and socially engage more with their peers.
4. Increased Power Production
Power is the ability to produce force rapidly. Power production in children is advantageous for activities of daily living, recreational play, and organized sports. A basic 8-week program performed twice per week improved lower body power by up to 10% in a group of 4th-grade children.
5. Improved Running Speed
Strength training improves acceleration and sprint speed in pre-puberty children. The effects are enhanced when strength training is combined with plyometric exercises (also known as jump training). Programs performed twice per week for as little as 6 weeks result in significant improvements in running speed.
6. Greater Change-of-Direction Speed
Change-of-direction is a change in the path of the body’s center of mass towards a new intended direction. Change-of-direction speed is a fundamental physical attribute in nearly all sports. In general stronger athletes change direction faster than weaker athletes. Of note, youth and males show larger adaptive potential to training than adults and females.
7. Improvements in Fundamental Movement Skills
Exercise designed to enhance muscular strength and fundamental movement skills early in life builds the foundation for an active lifestyle later in life. Strength training enhances competence and confidence to perform fundamental motor skills like running, jumping, throwing, catching, and kicking.
8. Enhanced Bone Health
Fears that strength training may injure the growth plates of children are not supported by science. The mechanical stress placed on the developing growth plates from strength training is beneficial for bone development. Childhood and adolescence are key developmental periods for increasing bone mineral density. Failure to participate in weight-bearing physical activity during these stages predisposes your child to poor long-term bone health (i.e., osteoporosis later in life).
9. Reduced Injury Risk
The complete elimination of all sports injuries is an unrealistic goal. However, sports conditioning programs that include strength training help reduce the likelihood of injuries in youth. This is proven across many sports like soccer, baseball, football, basketball, gymnastics, and others. Female athletes are particularly at risk. Young females who do not participate in strength training as they mature develop injury risk factors like poor jumping and landing mechanics. This is one reason why ACL injuries are so high in teenage girls.
10. Improved Psychological Health and Well-Being
Physical activity leads to improvements in psychological well-being, mood, and self-appraisal. Children who possess relatively low levels of self-concept at the start of an exercise program may be more likely to show significant improvement in comparison with those who begin training with a relatively high self-concept. Children often experience a quick initial improvement in strength. This builds self-confidence and a sense of achievement.
Develop the Right Strength Training Program for Children
The focus of youth strength training should be on developing the technical skills and competency to perform a variety of strength training exercises correctly. Exercises should be done at an appropriate intensity and volume. Trained professionals develop the best programs that are safe, effective, and enjoyable for children.
Your physical therapist is an expert in human movement across the lifespan. Physical therapists know what exercises your child should start with and how they should be progressed. To get your child started with strength training contact our office to schedule an evaluation with one of our doctors of physical therapy.
