Lindsay: Welcome, welcome to the Lifting Lindsay podcast.
Today we are gonna be doing a fun fact Friday where I
discuss, a fun fitness fact.
That's the whole idea around it, right?
So today we're gonna be talking about, uh, can children lift weights
or will it stunt their growth?
I'm sure you've heard that before.
So, the other day on Instagram, I showed video of me teaching my 9-year-old and
my 10-year-old how to lift weights.
So this is one of our goals that we have for summer.
I really wanna find ways to keep my kids active, but also they're showing
interest in learning how to lift weights.
And so I'm really excited about that and I'm just going to, I'm gonna go with it.
Well, they got it.
I'm gonna go with it.
Right?
So we had our first lesson.
There's actually a few things I'm gonna talk about from that lesson,
because I just put my camera on and I started recording a bunch of it.
One, I want to show my daughters what they looked like when they started.
Not physically people I'm talking about, like I wanna show them,
look, you were lifting, you know?
Five pounds doing this, this was your form.
And then after three months, be like, now look at your form.
Look at, you're doing 20 pounds.
Right?
So I want to show them that because that just fuels the
fire of progress, I feel like.
So I'm really excited to, to kind of document their progress.
And we're gonna be writing down like their weights and I'm actually
going to be sharing a, just a small.
Program that I'm doing with my girls.
So you can check that out in the show notes, what we're doing.
But I'm gonna give some tips on lifting with children and teaching
them how to lift after this.
But I do want to discuss this idea.
'cause when I posted this.
I got a lot of people asking me like, I would love to spend the next two
months with my kids doing stuff like this, but doesn't it stunt their growth?
And the answer is no, it does not.
So we now know all of the positive benefits that.
It can have on children to learn to lift weights both mentally and physically.
But we're going to discuss today specifically, where did this idea
then come that it's gonna stunt?
Children's growth.
'cause usually there's, there's two main reasons why people
are scared to teach children.
One, it's gonna stunt their growth two, uh, because, uh, they don't
want to get them to get injured.
So, so let's talk, discuss those a little bit.
The first one, the stunt growth.
So do you know what it, it's really sad when you actually track down and find
out where did this whole idea come from?
It's almost like kind of shocking when you hear what it came from.
Post World War ii, there was a study done on children that were doing hard labor.
We're talking about 80 plus hours a week, hard labor.
We're also looking at a group that was malnourished as well.
And what they saw and what the researchers saw was these children had had their
growth stunted and they jumped to this conclusion and everybody else did too.
That it wasn't this compilation of malnourishment and.
Hard labor, 8,000 plus hours a week.
But it was that children shouldn't lift weights because
it's gonna stunt their growth.
Like what?
You guys, I'm, I'm not, you can't make this stuff up.
Well, I'm sure somebody out there could, but, but I didn't, I didn't make this up.
This is where the idea came from.
In the post World War II in Japan, where look at what happened to their
economy, their, just the wreckage that they're dealing with as a nation,
and, and let's do a study on, on hard labor, on children and malnourishment.
And then let's walk away with it being like, and, and so no child
should wait ever weightlift.
Because that's actually, that's literally what happened.
So every time somebody says that, now you can say, no.
Nope, nope, nope.
This was, this was a, another bad case of, of people thinking that correlation
led to causation like this horrible, can't connect the dots very well kind of thing.
So I don't know about you and your children, but um.
It, it's hard enough to get my children to do 10 hours of hard labor a year,
so I don't think that they're gonna be, I'm totally, I'm totally teasing,
but I mean, I'm not, it is hard a week to get that out of them, but,
but I'm teasing, but this is not.
An issue that we have to worry about.
It is not showing actually that it is stunting growth, but it
is showing some great positive physical and mental benefits.
I'm really excited for the mental benefits when I set up my camera to
record, um, my girls so that I could, you know, show them their, their
progress and how their lifts are improving, their strength is improving.
I also caught this moment where my daughter, Hazel, uh, one minute
was fine working hard on the lake press, and I was actually her,
she was, she was doing me proud.
She was like, gym face grunting.
She's like giving it her all kind of thing.
I was really excited and she went from that to one second later just stops.
She's like, I can't, I can't.
It was, it was actually this beautiful moment that I captured.
I didn't share all of it out of respect for her.
Um, but I shared just a, a tiny little bit because I wanted people to see,
look, there's all these wonderful moments of me teaching something hard
to my kids, and we can highlight those.
And I think those are great to highlight.
Social media, but I don't want you to think it was not without this,
these moments too, where she just went in her head and I, I look at
her and I'm like, what's going on?
Where did you go?
Now I know my daughter, um, I know where she goes.
I know how fast it happens, and it is just so quickly goes into worst
case scenario, stops, throws a fit.
This, it's a, it's too hard and, and I'm not doing this.
I'm not good at it.
Nothing's working.
And she, she starts expressing all these things.
Somebody said to me, um, after they watched that, they said,
my, my son does that too.
How do you get him to listen to you when he's in that moment?
And I'm not the best parent out there.
Learn from my mistakes.
Okay?
The point isn't to get your child to listen to you.
It's actually to pause and learn to listen to them, um, in that moment.
So their prefrontal cortex has been hijacked, emotionally hijacked.
If you jump into solution mode where when they have been emotionally hijacked.
They're not gonna hear a word you're saying.
It's gonna be a wasted breath, and then you're gonna walk away wondering, why
couldn't I get them to listen to me?
But if you change it just a bit, this is what I've learned with a whole
bunch of, you know, trial and error, but a, but a whole bunch of error.
Okay?
if you change it to, how can I listen to them right now?
How can I get them to, and, and a little bit of the, the footage that you saw
or some of you saw was Hazel, you know, throwing this fit, being really angry.
She didn't like how hard it was.
She didn't like how she was being pushed into the hard because she
has a mom who's a coach, and what am I gonna, what am I gonna do?
Awesome.
You're feeling it's hard now, now.
To help with mental resilience, you're going to push into that hard.
But what does life teach you?
It's getting hard.
Lean, no way.
But here I am, telling her to lean into it.
And that was hard, and she just stopped.
Her walls went up, prefrontal cortex got emotionally hijacked.
She immediately too just shut down, and it happened so quickly as it does with her.
I kind of took a moment and I said, what, what happened?
And are you teachable right now?
And she's like, no.
So you have to understand too, we've tried to be Coach Hazel through this a million
times and we'll coach her through it.
Another million, right?
We'll keep doing this, but.
In that moment, I knew once I knew she's not teachable, teaching her was pointless.
But if I step into the emotion with her, then I can actually, it helps
her step out of the emotions faster.
So I leaned into it's, it's funny because here she is being
asked to lean into the hard.
And she retreats.
And then, and what does that do?
It makes me, as a parent now need to lean into the hard 'cause.
It's hard being a parent.
It's hard having the patience.
It's hard sitting in and with a child who is not thinking logically or
a, or just an adult, a person who's not thinking logically whatsoever.
But yet you, you haven't been hijacked, so all you're doing is thinking logically.
But that's actually annoying them.
Who's not thinking logically, because what do they feel?
They feel like they, they're not seen.
They're not heard.
So in order to help somebody back into a position where they can mentally
become resilient and push themselves and think logically, again, you have to
lean into that, that emotion with them.
You have to sit in it.
And then as a coach, you can guide them out.
But the point is not actually in this moment to have her
listen to me because she won't.
She can't.
And this isn't a 9-year-old thing.
This is an an adult thing.
This is a life thing.
This is, this is what everybody does when they get emotionally,
their brain gets hijacked.
They're going through a really, really hard time and somebody
comes in with pure logic.
It's like, don't, don't.
That's not how we connect.
Get into the emotion with me and then we can talk about solutions,
but I wanna feel seen and heard.
So that has been one of the hardest things as a parent is
learning to allow my children
to have all sorts of emotions without me getting pulled into
those emotions and become almost as childlike in my reaction as they are.
Right.
If I'm gonna teach them to be an emotionally mature adult,
I have to, that's not fair.
I don't wanna Right.
No, it's hard.
It's hard.
It's really hard that I actually think is what's really hard about parenting.
But right now I am reading a book and one of the things that I really
like about this book is that they do talk about how our role really
is one of counselor and coach.
We can't do these things for 'em.
It's called the self-driven child.
So I would strongly encourage.
You to listen to that.
I've gotten a lot of little nuggets from it.
It's not one of those books where you read and you wanna highlight every page.
I love those books, but, but I have, there's been a few aha moments
that I've really enjoyed from that.
So anyways, just so you know, teaching your child
weightlifting, it's gonna be hard.
There's gonna be those up and downs.
Um, but that's kind of what I showed the other day is this is.
This is actually part of it.
And then it was interesting because afterwards I showed another video of her
where she was doing biceps curls, and she said she was doing really, really well.
She's back to being positive, feeling capable, confident, and all a sudden
she's performing really well again.
And it was, it was really cute because I said, look at,
you go, you're doing awesome.
And she said, yes.
I just needed a good song.
To calm my mind and I was like, oh my goodness.
Out of the mouth of babes.
Isn't that true?
Good song.
Calm your Mind.
It was so cute, but it was really funny.
I decided to share afterwards.
Let me share the whole story.
It was, it was a wrestle, but do you know what?
That wrestle, like I said, is not just one that children have,
but it's, we have to learn.
As adults to have that same wrestle.
And one of the things that Hazel actually did is something that
I see adults do very common.
When we face that resistance, she immediately turned outside of herself.
'cause I asked her, I just started asking her questions.
What are you feeling?
Do you wanna talk about What feelings are you having?
Are you angry?
Are you sad?
Do you feel hurt?
Do you like what's going on?
And I just invited her without any shame, just to open up to feelings.
And, and at first everything was, it's just not working.
Everything's wrong.
The, the pad on the back of the leg extension that was to
blame, it was rattling and it was moving, so she couldn't do it.
And she starts looking outside of herself and blaming all of
these things outside of herself.
You know, that's really common as adults to do that too.
We quickly turn outside of ourselves in instead of taking, uh, extreme ownership
of the attitude that we're showing up in the fact that we're looking for all
of these, these people and things to blame instead of just taking extreme
ownership and redirecting the story that we tell ourselves to be more positive.
Hazel's words calming her mind.
Right.
So it was, it was a really cool thing to capture and then to talk about on,
um, on social media the other day.
Got a really positive and, and really good response from people saying,
it's nice to see that this is.
That other kids, uh, react the same.
Right.
And it's taken a lot of practice for me not to get pulled in to her emotions.
And I, I still, every once in a while do right.
But it, but I'm getting better.
As she's getting better.
It's a beautiful thing.
Okay.
Now let's move on to the next thing.
What about the risk of injury?
So it is interesting because people don't think twice about
putting their kids into, you know, casual soccer at the age of four.
Yet the risk of injury to those, those little sports teams is almost triple that
of the same injuries that we're seeing young children who do weightlifting.
But the funny thing is, young children who do weightlifting, their
injuries are usually hand and feet.
It's, it's them actually dropping things on hand and feet.
So if we can be there to guide them and help them, that's gonna be really awesome.
So now let me give some guidance on what I've done and every single
child is so different, but what I've done and my suggestion and advice
on getting kids into weightlifting, one, I don't think that they should
feel pressured by parents to do it.
I think that, uh, if parents are doing it and showing that it's fun and enjoyable,
and also that it's not unhealthily taking over every moment of their life
and dragging time, away from their kids, um, because their kids will see that
and then maybe build up a resentment to it and then not want to do it because
instead of spending time with me, my mom's always weightlifting, right?
Can you see that how easily that resentment can be built?
But if you are putting time and effort into your relationship with your
child, and then on top of it, they are seeing you, uh, demonstrating
mirror these, these healthy.
Um, lifestyle choices there gets a point where they, they may become
open and interested in learning more.
I have not tried to force weightlifting on my children.
Um, I.
We talk about how fun it is, we talk about, um, what we can do.
I, you know, I did X amount of weight on the leg press.
It was so awesome.
I did, uh, you know, I've built up to 18 pull-ups now, and my daughter at school,
you know, is starting to do pull-ups.
So she realizes, wow, that's awesome.
Can you teach me how to do that?
I wanna do that.
Right?
So she starts showing an interest and that's when I, um.
Speak to that.
I'm like, okay, then let's do it.
And then I don't jump to some radical every day weightlift with me.
It's like, no, how many times a week do you want to come train with me?
And, um, so then we kind of come up with a plan together.
So it's their idea.
It's not me trying to force what I love on them.
Uh, so that, that would be tip number one.
Tip number two, people are like, well, what do you do with them in the gym?
Usually I, um, I don't encourage starting with the most complex movements, so
day one we did some, we did do some squats, but very, very, very simple.
And they didn't have a bar on the back, on their back or anything like that.
Yes, they do have children's bars.
In fact, this Saturday, um, a five pound bar from Amazon, I'll share the link
in the notes is showing up because I talked to my girls about doing deadlifts
and showed 'em, and they wanna start working on strength and deadlifts.
And so it's something that, once again, they're involved with this idea that would
be fun to become strong in deadlifts.
and another thing too is I am.
I really am just adding a little fuel to the flame that they're bringing,
the energy that they're bringing.
Um, so my girls in school, they do things like pullups or they work on
hangs or pushups or sprints or these different planks, these different
exercises, crunches and stuff.
Um.
And so they have this desire next year to go back and be, you know, the girl
who can do a bunch of pull-ups and do more than the boys and these, and this
is stuff that, yeah, maybe I, I let that one slip like, oh, wouldn't it be cool?
And they're like, yeah, let's do it.
Right.
So it's, so that was a little inception.
That is what I'm doing a little inception.
And then once it like comes to fruition, I'm like, awesome, I'm jumping on it.
So their plans that I have for them right now, they have expressed this
desire to do three times a week.
So we're doing three times a week and during each one they get it.
They get to sip on their Gatorade, and that's really
exciting to 'em because we don't
just have drinks around my house like that.
And so they're really excited to sip on their cool fitness drink.
And then when their friends are around, then their friends have actually come
into the gym and done it with us before.
That's a little bit distracting, but it's, but it's fun.
So I make it fun and enjoyable.
I'm also having them track things too.
The first.
Two sets of each basic exercise that we go through are focused on form
and doing it correctly, and learning these new patterns of movement.
Because once again, they are, they are newbies.
They have no idea what they're doing, so they'll graduate out of this.
But just this first phase is just teaching them form and just
the, the pattern of movement.
We're using benches, we're using the wall to keep their arms stable.
So they'll put, I have a bench that has arms on it.
It's really cool.
But if you don't have that bicep curls, have them stand with their, their.
Back right up against the wall so that they can learn how to
do stable movements, right?
If you ever put a weight in a child's hand, show 'em how to do a bicep curl,
and you watch 'em and you're like, whoa.
There's like, it, it just, they're just like moving that thing everywhere.
Elbows are flying, shoulder blades going crazy.
It's like, I didn't realize somebody could be so creative
with a, a biceps curl right?
So with my kids, we're focusing on the first.
One to two sets are getting used to the motion going through good form.
And then the third set, I'm like, okay, what weight do you think you can
do for eight to 10 reps, or 10 to 12?
And then they, they get really excited and they pick a weight, and then
I let them, once again, these are simple movements, so if they're form.
Goes haywire.
It's actually not a big deal, but these are simple movements where
they get to pick the weight and then they put their goal and then, then
me and the other child just cheers 'em on like, yeah, you got this.
Do it.
And their form kind of goes out the wall.
They get a little crazy.
And do you know what?
That's okay.
Okay.
We are pushing them, we're encouraging them.
I want them to at least have that one set where they feel like they're
giving it their all and they're working so hard and they're tapping into
that mental piece of this is so hard and awesome and I'm doing it right.
So obviously the more complex the exercise, you can't.
If, when I'm doing deadlifts with them, 'cause I'm gonna start that
next week, I'm not gonna have them do that kind of crazy thing.
But I, I am really excited to slowly introduce new exercises.
But in the notes you are going to have my first draft of what we're going to
be doing together over the next month, and depending on how be, because my
goal really is to have them learn to do something hard and learn to push
into that hard and enjoy the hard and to have fun in learning how to lift.
That is my number one goal right now.
It's not teaching them perfect form.
It's not having them know the difference between a glute max
emphasis squat and a quad emphasis.
So it is none of that.
I want them, I want to light a fire under them of feeling strong, doing hard
things, pushing themselves to appropriate levels of failure and fatigue, and I
just wanna light that fire that gets 'em.
To where they want to be active and feel strong and move.
And so that's the whole point of it.
So go ahead and download that in the show notes just to kind
of see these basic things.
I'm also gonna have a few notes in there as well of, of different
things that, that we're trying.
After four weeks I'm gonna look at it and we're gonna track all of their lifts.
After four weeks, we'll look at it and I'll sit down with 'em and be
like, what are your favorite exercise?
I'll show them different exercise.
Do you guys wanna do these ones?
Get new goals with these exercises.
These are some of my favorite.
Do you want to, and I'm really going to pull them in because I don't, right
now, it's not about like, well, we need to make sure that, you know, we are
appropriately balancing out biceps and delts and back maneuvers and all this.
It's like, no, we're lighting a fire under them.
I.
To love movement, love, feeling strong and et cetera.
So anyways, just thought I would share where that myth came from.
And no, it's not gonna stunt their growth and just some tips and things
that I'm doing in my family to help teach my girls how to lift weights.
Thank you so much for joining us today on The Lifting Lindsay Podcast.
Hopefully this has been an interesting topic and I've given you some good
ideas to get you training with your kids or maybe know where to start.
If you have any questions, go ahead and send me a message on I.
Lifting Lindsey.
You can also check out my personal training.
Be strong dot lifting lindsey.com.
Join our community.
We can talk about these things as well.
I'm excited to get my community members to learn more about this and to start
training their kids as well, or at least inviting them to start training just a
little bit with them to light that fire.
You guys are awesome.
You have a wonderful week.