30/08/2026
From young to old, too many people fear risks of injury when lifting weights. I'll be the first to tell you I have indeed hurt myself while lifting weights. But I have also hurt myself walking, running, cycling, playing hockey, playing football, snowboarding and doing my job on more than one occasion as well. Pretty much the only time I do not hurt myself is while sitting on the sofa. But there have been times I have woken up in bed with an ankle or knee that hurts after a good night's sleep!
We let a ten-year-old strap on a helmet and run full speed into another ten-year-old and nobody blinks. Suggest that the same kid pick up a barbell with a parent standing next to him and someone will tell you they're too young, they're still growing, and it's dangerous. Both of those can't be right, so let's actually look.
We have been panicking about how weak American kids are for over 70 years. In the 1950s a doctor named Hans Kraus gave thousands of American kids a six-item test of muscular fitness and flexibility. Almost 58% of them failed at least one item. In Europe the failure rate was under 9%. When American kids came out about seven times weaker on the most basic measures, it got presented to Eisenhower, who built a federal fitness council over it. That grew into the Presidential Fitness Test, which just got revived by the current administration for the same reason it started.
What really bothers me is that we mostly refuse to do anything about it. The thing that most directly builds muscular fitness in kids is resistance training, and it's the one thing our culture still won't let them do. Most kids aren't very active. Only about 1 in 5 American teenagers meet the basic activity guidelines, which includes muscle-strengthening a few days a week, and even that number is soft because it counts push-ups in gym class. Actual structured lifting is rarer than that, despite knowledge of the problem dating back decades.
Part of the problem is that a new fear keeps showing up. First it was "lifting stunts their growth," which has thankfully been debunked. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the same body that once told kids not to lift, confirmed the opposite as recently as last year: supervised resistance training doesn't stunt growth and doesn't damage growth plates. So the growth story is gone, but it's often replaced with "well, it's dangerous, they'll get hurt lifting something heavy." This is also wrong.
When researchers reviewed thousands of youth weight-room injuries, the youngest kids weren't getting hurt by the weight being heavy. Two thirds of their injuries were from dropping weights on their fingers and toes, pinches or tripping over equipment. The risk of kids getting injured from lifting weights is very low, under two injuries per thousand hours of training. Youth distance running, which nobody calls dangerous, runs around six. That's three times higher, and it's non-contact just like lifting. Soccer and the other contact sports run several times higher still. And yet, soccer, running, and other sports don't face nearly the opposition that lifting weights does.
Access is a big problem, and part of it starts at home. When a parent strength-trains, their kid is about one and a half times more likely to strength-train too, which tracks with how everything else gets passed down: kids often take on the activity patterns they grow up watching. Most adults don't lift, so most kids never see it, and so it seems foreign instead of a basic part of taking care of yourself. Lifting for two, in a sense.
The formal barriers are worse. Most commercial gyms won't let a kid under thirteen through the door at all, parent or no parent, and the ones that do require an adult glued to their side. So the default place to get strong is legally closed to the exact age group with the most to gain, while the tackle-football sign-up sheet has no age floor at all. A ten-year-old can get hit at full speed on a field Saturday but can't stand next to a squat rack with his dad on Tuesday.
I've been on social media long enough to have a pretty good guess what the comments will be. "It has to be supervised by a qualified professional." No study has ever compared supervised to unsupervised youth lifting, so nobody has shown that a certification lowers the injury rate. What an adult in the room probably does is keep a kid on task and stop the horseplay that causes the dropped-weight accidents, and most attentive parents can do that. "Bodyweight is safer than weights."
Gymnastics is almost entirely bodyweight and has the worst growth-plate injury record in youth sport. A quarter of nonelite gymnasts in one study had a stress injury in the wrist growth plate. Loading your own mass through a joint over and over is not automatically the safe option, though when properly dosed, it’s fine too. "Technique first." Sure, coach the movement, but nobody's measured that as an injury variable either, and they can't even define "good technique" anyway.
My position is much simpler. A kid adapts to gradually increasing load the same way an adult does. I don't think that kids only get "neurologically stronger" without any real change to the muscle, because the neural adaptations don't account for all the strength they gain, so something structural is happening too. Kids generally don't have to chase a one-rep max unless they're competing in barbell sports, which is fine, but I wouldn't push maxing out in kids any more than I'd push it in adults, and for the same reason: what's the point? But "doesn't need to max out" is a long way from "can't," and I haven't seen good evidence to limit a kid's progression any differently than an adult's. That’s progressive loading btw, not overloading.
Practically speaking, the guidelines put the starting point around six or seven, which is about when a kid can follow the basic instructions of a session. That doesn't mean a young kid needs a barbell, but it doesn't mean they can't use one either. Barbells, dumbbells, bands, bodyweight, all of it works, whatever fits the kid and the movement. Machines are usually not a great choice, mainly because they’re built for adult-sized bodies. As with all exercise recommendations, there are some conditions that need medical clearance prior to starting, but age is not one of them.
So the next time someone tells you a kid shouldn't touch a weight, ask them for the study. There isn't one. We’ve reviewed the data and Dr. Derek Miles walked through all of it in our youth training series. Check it out, it’s linked in the first comment.
Are you okay with your kid lifting weights? Why or why not?
