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By Jordan Newton
Strength and Conditioning Coach
Cambridge Sports Performance Group
For many parents of sporty and active children, there is still this uncertainty of whether youth strength training will be beneficial for their child or if it will bring them harm. Without prior experience yourself, it can be very easy to get lost down a rabbit hole of other people's opinions.
Unfortunately, this misleading information on the internet comes from people that have, most likely, not done the research and/or even attempted to look through the hundreds of published articles that have shown the benefits strength training can have for the youth population. They’ll see a fully developed adult, with 10+ years’ experience of training in strength conditioning, putting 200 kilos on their back and think that’s what their child is going to do week one of the programme.
So, let's start there before we go onto some of the main myths we encounter. Strength training looks very different for different abilities and ages; you might think, ‘well duhh..’ but I do believe this statement gets lost a lot of the time. You see people go into the gym and load up a heavy back squat, when maybe they haven’t ever attempted a bodyweight squat or a goblet squat - a recipe for disaster. With younger youth athletes it's all about movement skill. Strength and power come second. What we are really teaching is movement patterns so when the athlete gets to the age where they are physically developed enough to really load some movements, they are safe, competent, and no teaching has to be done.
Quite the opposite. Of course, with any type of physical activity, there is an inherent risk of spraining an ankle, twisting a knee or straining a muscle, but we don’t stop children sprinting and bouncing around on the playground, do we? However, the risk of getting an injury during strength training is no greater than the risk of being hurt during sport, especially our contact sports. What strength training can actually do is better prepare youth athletes for the forces they will need to withstand within their sport. You see, every time we sprint, jump or tackle, our body has to withstand forces from external objects, such as another player, or external surfaces, such as the floor. This may cause our muscles to lengthen at high speed, or joints to move in an unwanted direction, which may cause sprains and strains. With strength training, youth athletes can;
1. Learn the control of their body to make sure joints stay in safe positions
2. Build strength to stop their muscles from stretching at a speed they can’t handle
Now, I understand the thought process behind this one - high loads placed on the skeletal system through back squats, bench press, etc., will compress the bones. However, bones will grow to the length they would anyway, whether a child participates in strength training or not. Strength training in youth athletes has actually been seen to result in the building of bone mineral density, therefore decreasing the likelihood of breaks and fractures. Bones are always rebuilding themselves, to stay healthy to cope with everyday tasks; with added intensity and compression, through strength training, bone-remodelling cells build stronger bones to cope with those greater than average intensities found in sport.
Looking past just the bones, overuse injuries from growth can be reduced by building stronger muscles to cope with these new longer limbs. For example, bones grow quicker than muscles and tendons so, what we find is that, through a child's growth spurt, muscles put extra tension on what are called, ‘growth plates’ which is why children get pain in their heels, knees, hips, elbows, etc. Strength training builds muscles to better cope with these newfound lengths, relieving the tension on the growth plates.
Well yes, if you are expecting a 12-year-old to start back squatting twice their body weight; that would be dangerous for most beginners, even if they are a fully-grown adult. Children aren’t mini adults and the way training is structured is slightly different. As children grow, they go through a phase of what we call adolescence awkwardness which, in short, is a period of time during their growth spurt when coordination goes out the window; they now have these long arms and legs to try and control, and not the strength capabilities to control them with. This is why, during youth S&C, there is a constant need to go back to the basics and refine technique. With a qualified strength coach, and a well thought out training pathway, a youth athlete can build brilliant technique and strength while staying safe.
When we think of youth S&C we typically split children up into three groups; Pre Peak Height Velocity (PHV), Circa-PHV and Post-PHV. Peak Height Velocity is their growth spurt, the point during growth and maturation where they grow at the quickest rate. During circa and post PHV is where they can start reaping the benefits of hormonal changes that come with puberty. Before this, during Pre-PHV, there won’t be much increase in muscle size; a lot of the changes and adaptations associated with strength training, in youth athletes, develop in the central nervous system. During this time, we are most susceptible to developing new movement patterns and increasing muscle activation. This is how youth athletes’ pre-PHV becomes faster and stronger, because their movement patterns increase, resulting in quicker sprint times and greater activation of more muscle fibres to produce more force. During puberty, we have increases in testosterone in both males and females, but more in males, and this is where we start to see an increase in muscle size, tendon size and muscle length, which have been associated with increases in strength and speed. Now, I know what you’re thinking, ‘so they will just get stronger with age’. Yes, of course, and for someone that isn’t exposed to the stress of sport, that would probably be enough but, to cope with the demands of sport, to be good in that sport and stay healthy, we need levels of strength that surpass the stress we experience in sport.
In the early years especially, but all throughout a child’s growth, nail the fundamentals. We call them the AMSC’s (Athletic Motor Skill Competencies) and this includes every form of movement from the push, pull, squat lunge and hinge patterns in the gym, plus fundamental movement skills such as kicking, throwing, running, etc., and acceleration, deceleration, jumping and landing, and core bracing and rotation. Learning these patterns during the early years will give a youth athlete a large toolbox of movement skills that can be used in every sport.
Work to the level of the youth athlete! When training children we see it as a marathon not a sprint. Yes, we can make strength and speed improvement in younger athletes but, if they have terrible movement competency, that’s where we are going to spend most of our time. Once they have the skill nailed, that's when you can start increasing the intensity to push for strength improvements and not have to worry if the athlete has bad form. This also goes for where they are in terms of maturation; there is no point looking to put size on a youth athlete pre-PHV because the body just won’t respond in that way.
My final piece of advice would be consistency and maintaining constant exposure to all the different AMSC’s weekly in order to build the skill level necessary to dominate in sport but also to get the most out of strength training.