Takano Athletics

This topic comes up all too frequently but needs to be addressed nonetheless.  A 13 year old writes in to a blog asking whether his age is too young to begin weightlifting as his parents fear it will slow down his growth.  Some of the answers are a bit cautious while others are just wrong.  Let me have a go at this.  Since the blog is Russian, I am going to assume (perhaps wrongly) that weightlifting means well, weightlifting (Olympic lifting?)

A  reader named John J responds that too much weight will compress his bones instead of stretching it and then cautions that if the youngster eats too much because of tiredness he will become fat and short.  I guess any weight is too much, but there are many studies showing that proper resistance training increases the incorporation of calcium into the bones.  This sounds like a formula for bone growth especially in a 13-year-old whose epiphyses haven’t closed.

An Australian reader responds that according to the Australian Institute of Sport no real weight-lifting training should begin until an athlete is 16.  He further cautions that if the weight can’t be lifted more than ten times it can and will damage the ligaments.  Pheuw!  In the U.S. we’ve had competitive lifting programs for youngsters under 13 years of age for three decades.  I don’t know of too many that had damaged ligaments.    Where does this stuff come from?  How is it possible to prescribe such hard and fast rules for one of the most morphologically varied species on the planet?

A third reader advises not to overdo the weightlifting, but to balance it with stretching and other limbering exercises because this will work the tendons and muscles as well as flexibility and agility.  He claims the agility promotes growth in adolescents.  Then he advocates doing more bodyweight movements.  I believe snatches and clean and jerks work tendons and muscles while promoting flexibility and agility.

Reader Number 4 advises not to do too much too soon as weight training will overburden the muscles and skeleton.  He further recommends doing light weights and jumping rope and swimming and the muscles will appear on their own.  I guess that weight training or weightlifting doesn’t make the muscles appear on their own.

Reader Number 5 advises that 13 is way too young because weightlifting is very bad for one’s height and to notice how most of professional weightlifters are tiny.  Of course that is why we have 8 different weight classes for men and 7 for women so that all the tiny people can choose what they want to weigh regardless of height.

OK.  Here’s what I’ve figured out over the last four decades of coaching many juniors beginning with 11-year-olds.  Proper training affects the metabolism significantly and when applied during puberty will actually put the body in a much greater anabolic state.  That is all the biochemical pathways for assembling complex molecules are functioning optimally.  An increased appetite coupled with an adequate diet will insure that more nutrients are absorbed and available for synthesis in the tissues that are stimulated by the training.  Properly supervised training combined with proper nutrition from pre-puberty to adulthood will insure that the full genetic height potential of the individual is reached.

What will stunt growth is a lack of proper nutrients or a lack of variety in the diet.  Athletes who are fed suboptimally in many cases such as gymnasts and lighter bodyweight wrestlers may not reach the full growth potential although it may be difficult to ascertain this since both of these sports select shorter athletes in many cases.  We do know however, that humans as a species got shorter when we switched from hunter-gatherer lifestyles and became reliant on an agrarian society, as the initial efforts at farming produced a small variety of foods.   Pre-civilization human skeletons are on average significantly taller than those of early agrarian society members.

Yes, some weightlifters are short, but some are tall.  Could we not infer that the tall ones became taller because of weightlifting?  Actually we are at a point where the height of competitors is limited by the distance between the inside collars.  That distance was established as a rule over 70 years ago.  The tallest competitor to hold a world record in the snatch was Kahlevi Lahdenranta of Finland who stood 1.95 m tall.  A much taller athlete with significant muscle mass on the shoulders would not be able to support a snatch overhead given the current dimension of the apparatus.

Short weightlifters are just people who are genetically short.  The sport selects people for the lighter bodyweight classes and they are shorter than average.  The same can be said of jockeys who are selected because they must weigh less than 50 kg. so as not to inhibit the speed of the horse.  No one has argued that equitation makes you short because jockeys are short.

As usual, comments are welcome.