If you think weights are not for children, muscle strengthening exercises are injurious to kids, here’s something for you.

Team@CMHF

When Suzie Grill is playing high school soccer and basketball, her legs get an intense workout. But that’s less true for the 15-year-old’s upper body.
So her mother, Patty Grill, likes that their fitness center in Munster, Ind., helps “train the muscles she doesn’t use in those sports. It makes her more balanced and a better, stronger player.”
When swimmer and cross-country runner Garrett Smith, 15, hits the center’s weight machines, he’s looking “to firm up, but not get too big,” he says.
His mother, Denise Smith, says working out “makes him feel stronger and feel good about himself.”
Health and fitness experts say more teens, athletes and non-athletes, as well as their younger siblings, should follow Suzie’s and Garrett’s example, because a supervised, age-appropriate strength-training program can do them all good.
Some parents may wonder whether weight training can harm young muscles, but the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Sports Medicine are among the major medical groups that endorse strength training (also referred to as resistance training) as a beneficial activity for young, developing bodies. It increases muscle strength and endurance; improves motor skills, performance in sports and overall fitness; and may protect muscles and joints from some sports-related injuries, they say.
“Any good fitness program should include a weight component, along with a flexibility component and a cardiovascular component,” says the physician Joel Brenner When to start training
Kids can start weight training as soon as they show interest and have “the emotional and physical maturity to accept and follow directions,” usually about age 7 or 8, says
Most health and fitness groups do not endorse competitive power lifting and body building for still-growing young people. “It’s important that they don’t overdo it,” Brenner says. “That’s when we see injuries.”
Though an increasing number of kids involved in organized sports turn to strength training as part of off-season and preseason conditioning, many non-athletes, as well as “deconditioned … inactive” kids, overweight or not, also would benefit, Faigenbaum says.
Girls won’t bulk up
Boys are often eager to start weight training, but some girls still resist it out of the mistaken belief that they will develop big, bulky muscles. Strength training will make girls’ muscles stronger, but they do not produce enough of the hormone testosterone to build large muscles, says Pillarella.
And more girls are getting that message. Smart strength training for kids, as with adults, needs to be individualized, based on what each person “wants to accomplish, what their abilities are, what their mental readiness is,” says Jim Kauffman, national director of health and well-being for the YMCA of the USA.
The key is a qualified instructor who has a sound understanding of strength training principles, safety guidelines and “the uniqueness of how and why a child moves,” Faigenbaum says. “An 8-year-old is different from an adult,” and kids have to “enjoy the experience. If it’s not fun, a kid will drop out.”

Ref: http://yourlife.usatoday.com/parenting-family/story/2012-03-13/Strength-training-does-a-young-body-good-too/53515902/1