Lifting Weights STUNTS Growth (THE TRUTH!!)

Have you been told that lifting weights will stunt your growth if you start at too early of an age? In this video, I’m going to dig into the science of workout stress and see what impact it plays on developing bones and ultimately the height of the person lifting the weights. Is there a real cause

so as you can see when it comes to muscle recovery it’s not just about how much you recover but how long it takes you to recover hey jeff did you see about this new study about uh weight lifting something growth i mean what a load of bullets here right look at this growth holy [ __ ] what what’s up guys jeff kevin here today we’re going to talk about whether or not weight lifting stunts your growth right because this is something that i’m sure you’ve been told either by your pediatrician or by your mother or your father or you’ve read it somewhere online but somewhere you’ve encountered the fact that weight training is going to stunt your growth if you started too early i want to make sure that i set the record straight so we do have to look around and when we do traditionally we see that the guys that excel in weight training the guys that excel in olympic lifting some of the power lifters they’re of shorter stature there’s no denying that but i will tell you this is it sort of a cause and effect relationship here is it the chicken in the egg did the training itself make these guys stay at a stunted height when they got older were they being held back in their development in their height because of their participation as a youth in training or are they in the positions they are the top of their sport because being short provided them some advantages and right there we have to sort of acknowledge that guys that we know that because the mechanical leverages are going to be in your favor the shorter you are because we know that the distance having to be traveled even on a bench press when you have shorter arms is going to be to your advantage we realize that it’s more of the latter it’s not that it was causing this it’s that these guys excelled in that sport because of this now this is where it all originates though this fear is around surrounded by the fact that when we get damage to the growth plates in our long bones and the lung bones are the bones of your tibia your lower leg your femur your upper arm here the humerus it has a softened area at each end of the bone okay and the growth plate is a non-calcified area more cartilage based area of the bone that allows the bone to continue to lengthen over time as you grow ultimately what happens after you reach puberty is those those areas begin to calcify and fill in no longer being adaptable in size and that’s sort of the end length of how big your bones are going to be but because they’re non-calcified because they’re cartilage based they’re basically susceptible to some more injury because they’re soft now let’s look at these injuries because this is what’s really really important when it comes to determining whether or not there’s a load of crap when we’re talking about weightlifting causing damage here the first type of injury that we get to this growth plate is one that actually goes right along the growth plate and we call these fractures of these growth plates all right right along the same line parallel to that growth plate the second one would actually involve a fracture here and then up into the more proximal portion of this bone right where it fractures along that line the third type would actually come around on the area of the growth plate as well and then fractured down through the bottom or distal portion of that bone then we have the type that actually crosses all three areas it crosses the top portion the bottom portion and through the growth plate itself and then the final part here if i’m in the way is we have this sort of crush injury of the actual growth plate right along here but it’s crushed from the top down now when you look at these types of injuries you have to ask yourself which of these activities that you’re seeing me doing here this squat or this deadlift or this bench press right tricep push down which of these is causing these stresses to these bones which they’re not we’re not getting these types of fractures and stresses applied to these long bones of our body if anything we’re creating supportive stresses by loading our muscles up and loading our bones and creating some some weight-bearing ground reaction forces through these long bones it’s a good thing but none of them are creating these fractures these are the types of things that occur in contact sports like football like repetitive contact sports like jumping repetitively in basketball or more commonly with kids it’s in accidents things like snowboarding accidents or skateboarding accidents things where you get these these contorted impacts and forces that are impacting these bones that create these types of fractures and i got to tell you this even when that happens maybe only in about 20 to 30 percent of those cases where we actually have damage to these growth plates is it actually going to cause stunted growth most commonly it’s these real severe crush injuries that are going to cause that stunted growth so again you have to ask yourself whether or not this is even a real thing beyond that we have some things called you know stress fractures that you probably heard of the stress fractures are very common especially in gymnastics but even in that case guys when you look at this a stretch fracture is going to occur more commonly not in the growth plate areas but more in the bones themselves here in the transverse processes of the lumbar spine when a gymnast does a lot of repetitive excessive extension through their low back you can actually get fractures here but again that’s not something that’s related to the growth plate so it’s not really concerned now where is some of this advice though that comes to you that says well you shouldn’t train then until you’ve reached puberty you know where that really comes from guys it comes from the fact that hormonally you’re not going to benefit that much from your training if you don’t have the hormones to support the efforts you’re trying to create if you’re trying to create more muscle and you’re an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old good luck it ain’t really gonna happen it’s sort of wasted effort so those recommendations aren’t based off of growth plate fears although some pediatricians still think that because again they’re stuck in the in the ways of their older older thinking and sort of believing in this myth it’s not about the growth place it has nothing to do with that it’s just supporting your efforts with a better hormonal environment to actually allow you to take advantage of your efforts so what my recommendation is is when you’re growing up as you’re approaching your teens as you’re reaching puberty there is no problem with learning the right way to train and one of the best things you can do is actually implement a technique bar if that’s what you’re going to do and if you’re going to eventually wind up training with real weights learning how to manipulate a barbell at an early age is going to be very beneficial to you a technique bar is going to be a very light load something that that any young adolescent let’s say 10 11 12 can actually use very safely the most important thing that you should be learning to do at that point is to develop your technique to develop the movement patterns whether you train with a bar or not there’s nothing stopping you from learning how to correctly lunge how to correctly pull how to correctly push vertically right all the things we just talked about in a recent video those key foundational movement patterns how to squat how to hinge these are all key movements that you need to learn how to do and then eventually learn how to load but i will show you again these movements that we