Guidelines on when children should start training

AL Gondi

Last Sunday we discussed the injuries in the immature skeletal-muscular system and that over exercising and intense training cause tightness of muscles and hence emphasis should be on stretching.

When then should a child start exercises? There are very few guidelines about when and how a child may begin to participate in sports and fitness activities. However, most guidelines are on adults designed to improve fitness parameters and decrease factors for diseases.

There is an assumption that child-hood activity translates in improved childhood health, adult activity or adult health and fitness. There is, however, no evidence to support this assumption. Adult activity correlates more with perceived competence and achievement level in physical education in classes at the age of 15. Musculoskeletal overuse injuries occur more frequently in children who train in one sport compared to those who train in different sports or activities.

It is therefore, necessary that pre-puberty children should be advised to participate in many activities they enjoy and delay specialisation until adolescence. This is, however, different in some sports that require certain manoeuvres when the children are lean and small as in gymnastics, diving and more recently football.

Scientific studies have shown that strength training is both effective and safe for pre-pubertal children. It is true that strength training may make a critical difference in preventing injuries for those children who specialise in a few sports at an early age.

Strength Training

Strength training is particularly essential for the child who has previously been inactive and then begins intensive sport activity. All of the musculoskeletal structures that is the bones, muscular-tendons unit and ligaments must gradually and progressively adapt by gaining strength and size the demands that the sport may be placing on the child’s body.

The training must be gradual and the resistance and intensity must increase slowly and progressively. The percentage increase of strength is similar in both children and adults who do a similar strength training programme. The strength increase appears to be mainly from neuromuscular adaptation as there is very little increase in the skeletal-muscle size. There is no gender disparity in trainability of pre-pubertal children.

Strength training for children must be supervised. All equipment appropriate for the child’s size. The adjusted equipments must be with free weights or with equipment such as stability balls. When free weights are used then the amount of weight should be relatively small, the child’s form and technique must be correct and close supervision is extremely important.

Competitive weight lifting and comparison of maximum resistance should be prohibited. Children are therefore encouraged to do exercises that the child’s own weight as push-ups and pull-ups or exercises using large balls to balance on and adds increasing challenge related to the factor of instability.

Strength training should be part of periodical conditioning program. Other components of the program include flexibility, aerobic and anaerobic training. It seems that many children’s sports injuries are prevented by a programme that combines strength training and flexibility.

In addition to improved performance, the goals of a youth strength-training program are learning safe strength training principles, improving balance and injury reduction, which I will tackle next Sunday.

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