A review of "Kids Must Strength Train - A Call To Action"

Recently posted on the NSCA website, was an article titled "Kids Must Strength Train - A Call To Action". This Article was posted on November 6th, 2020 and was written by Jonathan Kilian, CSCS, CSPS and Justin Kilian, MEd, CSCS,*D. The article will be linked below, however some individuals may be unable to access it because it is currently the restricted property of the NSCA and at the time of this blog post, review is only available to current NSCA members.

The article delves into various reasons as to why it is ever so important for children and adolescents to incorporate strength training into their sports experience. without giving away too many specifics of the article, it touches upon the general benefits of strength training at a young age, implications for athleticism, the safety of youth resistance training (RT), and the carry over in adulthood. In this blog post, I aim to discuss my thoughts on these areas in brief paragraphs.

The first area of the article highlighted the benefits of youth RT. This paragraph in my blog post could very well turn into an article of it's own with the amount of benefits observed from youth ages 8-16 resistance training. There are dozens upon dozens of studies (many of which by Avery D. Faigenbaum) that examine the results of youth Rt. In nearly all studies observing a young population participating in controlled, safe RT, there are several benefits that are highlighted. First of all is the increase of bone mineral density. This is an adaptation that occurs to all populations who resistance train, but in children who are constantly putting their bodies through heavy impact (whether sports, or jumping off of playground jungle gyms) bone mineral density i.e. stronger, denser bones, lead to a decreased injury risk of fractures and breaks. Another benefit of youth RT is neuromuscular faciliation (otherwise known as 'mind-muscle connection') Through the activity of controlled RT under supervision and with proper load management and assigned volume, children learn how to use, and activiate specific muscles in a way that less structured, ballistic movement such as playing sports or field games, do not allow for. Youth RT studies have shown RT to lead to a significant improvement in coordination. Of course, another benefit and one that should not be understated is strength building. Hypertrophy is rather uncommon in youth due to the lack of hormones associated with increased muscle growth such as testosterone and cortisol, however developement of type I, type II, and type IIx muscle fibers is not uncommon. Through RT, children can make significant strength gains, even with hypertrophy being unsupported. The final benefit to youth RT I will discuss is the translationg to sport. strength training translates very well to the field. A structured program containing four sets of goblet squats twice a week for three months (amongst other exercises of course) could very well be the difference for your child robbing the rival team from a homerun in the championship game, or just coming short on the ever so important jump to rob that trophy clinching homerun.

This segues very nicely into the next area discussed in the article, which addresses how RT translates into athleticism. Simply put, as long as athletic components such as speed, agility, jumping, cutting, etc, are practiced or performed to some capacity, RT will NOTnegatively affect athleticism. This is because all of the aforementioned athletic components discussed as rely on two fundamental components; quickness and power. Both of these componants can be trained with resistance for improvement. For example, take jumping. Jumping is a display of lower body power to move the body vertically to accomplish a goal. The key word here being power. Power is essentially work performed in a specific time frame. Power is great if a large amount of work is performed in a short amount of time. For instance, exercises that utilize this principle...think powercleans and snatches. However, because of the advanced technique required on these movements, power exercises for youth are more akin to 3-2-1 tempo squats, box jumps, or bounding. by training both lower body and upper body power, a young athlete is able to perform better, jump higher, react quicker. Speed is, of course, another factor that carries over directly to athleticism. RT can improve speed in many different ways, but generally this is best done by moving loads quickly and explosively, and training type 1 muscle fibers with a load. The logic behind this reasoning is that if a young can learn how to control a load quickly, with correct technique and coordination, they can apply that to their own movement where the only load is their own body.

Safety is another concern for youth training. Assuming the youth is training under appropriate supervision, learning technique intially, and applying the proper load and volume to the movement they are doing, RT in all circumstances is entirely safe given a healthy adolescent. issues may arise if one of the previously mentioned factors is altered or removed. In fact, without RT, it is widely theorized that the risk of injury during athletics is increased far beyond what the risk would be with a trained athlete. Reasons for this not only include physiological adaptations due to training, but the adding coordination associated with RT, and likely the increased kinesthetic sense due to neurological adaptation.

Finally, I will discuss youth RT and it's carry over into adulthood. Generally speaking, individuals who weight train from a young age, are more likely to continue training into middle age, then those individuals who are introduced to it at a later age. This may be evidence for RT bringing such benefit that those individuals who have experienced those benefits for longer, are less likely to risk giving up those benefits. In addition to this, adults who have resistance trained from a young age (preadolescence) are shown to retain bone density better and resist osteoarthritus and osteoperosis for longer than those who have not. It is important to note that the study examining this correlation was done with error in cross examination and thus it's validity is questionable.

In conclusion, the article linked below is absolutely worth the read if you are able to access it. Now more than ever, with the sedentary lifestyle the Covid-19 pandemic has and the increasing rates of obesity in the U.S. it is more important than ever to begin resistance training from a young age as it's beneficial for general wellness, improves athletic performance, is safe if practiced properly, and even has tranlsation into adulthood.

https://www.nsca.com/education/articles/ptq/kids-must-strength-train-a-call-to-action/