An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure.
- September 3rd, 2009
- Posted in Featured . Strength Training . The Adolescent Athlete
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I doubt Benjamin Franklin was talking about the training of young athletes when he coined the phrase but he might as well have been. Getting an early jump on resistance training can go along way towards preventing injuries later on.
How early is “early”? According to the position stand of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA), “if a child is ready for participation in sport activities, then he or she is ready for some type of resistance training”. This can include children as young as 7 or 8 years of age. Some parents might think that a bit too early. Most, unfortunately, give the idea no thought at all.
For the vast majority of young athletes, their first exposure to resistance training comes during their freshman year in high school. Research shows that that may be a little too late – at least when it comes to injury prevention.
In looking at the graph above we can see that the incidence of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries spikes quite dramatically from 15-19 and more so in females. The reasons for this are quite varied and beyond the scope of this post but the take-home message is two-fold:
- the liklihood of injury (especially ACL injury) is greatly reduced with a properly designed resistance training program
- waiting too long to get started can be detrimental to your child’s health.
Heath Voss #13
I am in full agreement here, Steven. I think parents are reluctant to get their kids involved in resistance training due to the abundance of myths associated with children lifting. Lifting will not stunt growth, create a “meathead” or develop an inclination to use PEDs. While, as professionals, we need to be choosy about how we load these kids, in the long run it is very much beneficial for development.
Parents are reluctant to get their kids into resistance training, yet they will put them in 5 different baseball leagues over the entire year.
When do kids have time to train if the parents are always signing them up for all these youth leagues? There is no offseason.
The gym is where fundamentals take place. You can slow things down to a more manageable pace and really learn movements. Everything on the field during practice or games is always 100% and most of the times the coaches are volunteer coaches, just supervising nonsense – there is no real coaching going on.
patrick