When Building Muscles Is Too Soon and Too MuchBy Christina Esparza  You know your kids are growing up when they start preferring push-ups over pushes on the swing set; when they graduate from flicking rubber bands to flexing their biceps.
As a parent, it’s important that you encourage your child’s physical activities, but at the same time, you should also teach them where to draw the line. Wanting to improve one’s physique is good, but like anything else, too much of a good thing can be harmful in the end. When done correctly, strength training can increase muscle strength and endurance and help improve athletic performance. If you’re not careful, it can lead to sprains, strains, cramps, growth plate damage and other more serious muscle, bone and joint injuries.
When Is It Too Soon?At the age of 6, Richard Sandrak, also known as “Little Hercules” and “The World’s Strongest Boy,” already had eight-pack abs and was pressing four times more than his own weight. This is obviously an extreme and unusual case, and many medical experts and critics alike advise against bodybuilding at a very young age. In fact, the goal of lifting weights shouldn’t be to bulk up, but to help muscles become stronger and more efficient.
So when is it safe to start? According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, boys can start strength training at the age of 12, and girls at the age of 10, so long as the program is supervised and properly designed.
Prior to starting, consult with a physician as well as with a certified trainer or fitness expert to get guidance on what regimen would be most appropriate for your child and how often it should be done. Make sure that the training sessions are always supervised, and that proper warm-up and cooling down exercises are followed each time.
When Is It Too Much?While the appropriate exercises vary per individual, it’s usually best for young people to avoid heavy weightlifting equipment, such as bench presses, and to practice low-resistance exercises instead, using free weights, weight machines and rubber resistance bands. As they master the technique and improve their strength, more weight or repetitions can be added incrementally.
Remind your kids that resting is as important as staying active, and that it usually takes the body 48 hours to recover from exercise. In fact, there are no additional benefits to strength training more than four times a week.
When it ceases to be a fun and healthy activity and starts to become a burden or an obsession, it’s definitely time to shelve the iron. In the end, the best sign of a healthy body and mind is not the ability to lift the most weight in the most number of days, but the ability to love your body well enough to know when to stop.
Did You Know?- The tongue is made up of 16 muscles, not one.
- There are approximately 639 skeletal muscles in the human body.
- Each muscle is made up of thousands of individual cells, also called muscle fibers. Contrary to popular belief, the number of muscle fibers cannot be increased through exercise; instead the muscle cells simply get bigger.
- Scientists have discovered that deviations in a protein called myostatin explain why some people are more muscular and athletic than others (the less you have, the stronger you are).
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