Myth: Resistance weight training will stunt an adolescent’s growth.
Truth: This is absolutely false. If weight training stunts growth, children shouldn’t run, jump, play, or exert themselves, lest they all be “stunted.”
The concern is that resistance training will cause early fusing of the growth plates resulting shorter bones and shorter stature. While that sounds scientific because the growth plate is the location of long bone growth, it is absolutely false because children put all sorts of stress on their growth plates from running, jumping, and playing like kids do. There are hundreds of pounds of pressure on children’s growth plates through normal play, and unless a bone is broken, all that stress is actually good for it.
The half-truth buried in this myth is that a fracture through a growth plate, which is actually quite rare, can arrest cell replication and lead to uneven growth in that single bone. Lifting weights won’t, however, cause every bone in your body to stop growing!!
Facts from other sources:
Weight training in youth-growth, maturation, and safety: an evidence-based review - “training protocols with weights and resistance machines… are relatively safe and do not negatively impact growth and maturation of pre- and early-pubertal youth.”
Does Lifting Weights During Puberty Stunt Your Height? This is an opinion piece that postulates that resistance training might increase testosterone in boys which could increase final height.
Lifting Weights STUNTS Growth (THE TRUTH!!) YouTuber with some degrees and science behind his theories.
DOES WEIGHT TRAINING STUNT GROWTH? - Directly to the point “There is no evidence that high-impact sports like gymnastics, soccer, football, and basketball harm growth plates. The same is true for weight training.” Pulls from these big sources:
Bottom line: Unless you plan on breaking every bone in your body when you workout, stress on your muscles and bones from resistance training will no more stunt your growth than those extra sprints at practice that burn so much you wish you were in a cast.
