The Myth of Lift-Stunted Growth
The ongoing debate over the question of safety regarding the introduction of weightlifting to children and adolescents has persisted for many years. Leading many who are non-educated in the topic to automatically believe in the fallacy that it could damage your child’s growth plates, halt their natural height development and increase risk of bone fractures. In the social media driven world we live in today, the term “weightlifting” is often associated with athletes pushing themselves to the absolute limit of their body, whether that medium is through bodybuilding, powerlifting, etc. This is just one of the leading factors to cause the misconception that weightlifting is dangerous for our children.
However, weightlifting when structured correctly, and properly supervised, offers superior benefits to our young athletes in the making, compared to other common youth sports. Weightlifting outright does not belong in the category of physical activities that can damage growth plates, nor the category of activities that can damage bone density development or have higher likelihood of bone injuries outright. If you asked me, off the top of my head, sports that do fit these categories would be American football, ice hockey, gymnastics, etc. Even with the statistically high rate of injuries in these youth sports, there’s a lack of silent shunning or serious concern for injuries them, that weightlifting has. When you take the right approach to weightlifting, it is ironically extremely beneficial in the categories it’s deemed dangerous in, especially in comparison to much more common youth sports.
Growth plates, scientifically known as “epiphyseal plates” are cartilage located at the end of certain bones, just naming a few that are common knowledge would be the femur, humerus, vertebrae, etc. One thing any party can agree upon is that their role in a child’s growth truly cannot be overstated, as they are solely responsible for the bone lengthening in development. While somewhat susceptible due to their flexible nature and being subject to exposure of improperly managed stress. We must highlight what qualifies as physical activities that would impose this type of risk or stress on the plates.
Activities that impose sudden high-impact contact don’t necessarily qualify. This may sound contradictory to the statement I made before, but I am a firm believer that any activity is fine for a child when it is properly managed and supervised. The youth sports that I listed earlier (American football, ice hockey, gymnastics) were listed because of their statistically higher likelihood of resulting in injury. This says more about how much more difficult it is to properly manage a youth sport with many children running around, which involves high impact collisions and falls. Even with proper management you cannot say that these factors will disappear, it is an essence of the sport they practice.
Weightlifting when properly managed has little to zero spontaneous direct contact or effects, random twists, or falls. These are the real dangers to the plates, uncontrollable spontaneous movements that arise in general sports, not something you see in weightlifting. For instance, gymnastics have repeated landings from great heights that have extremely sudden high impact compression on the lower body, directly affecting growth plates in the legs. Football players will regularly experience extremely sudden high impact collisions that can result in uncontrollable movements that will affect the bones containing these plates. Weightlifting, on the contrary, only involves a singular person at time, direct management of stress loading (weight on the barbell, etc.) and controlled repetitive movement that, when properly managed, is a regiment that can linearly be built upon, avoiding all the risks that were mentioned earlier.
When it is properly designed or managed, weightlifting truly belongs on the list of activities that support healthy growth for children, not hinder it. How could an activity that revolves around resistance training of the muscles around the growth plates, damage them? Gradual increased stress loading and controlled movements that will eventually build muscle, which also lack any spontaneous stress on the bone underneath or growth plates, can only be beneficial.
One of the many misconceptions is that weightlifting puts children’s bones in a state prone to fractures. This, however, is completely unfounded and has no basis. The opposite has been proven, weightlifting has been shown to increase bone density, particularly in growing children/adolescents. According to this study published by BioTech, boys bone density will significantly benefit from the introduction of resistance training by the age of 12. This increased bone density will outright lower risk of bone fractures, ironically the thing that people feel children will experience from weightlifting.
Some may disregard this study and believe it to be false, but the numbers don’t lie. These two case studies on weightlifting found within this scientific literature state that only 0.053 to 0.055 children and adolescents who practiced powerlifting for 100 hours had an injury, the other study at an even lower number of 0.035 per 100 hours. Now let’s take just one example founded by this survey of injury rates, this literature states that per 100 young soccer athletes exposed to a normal 90 minute duration soccer game, 2.1 of them experienced a serious injury. Take this number and do this arithmetic (2.1injuries/1.5hours then multiplied by 100 hours). This equates to 140 injuries per 100 hours, that’s right, now compare it to the rate we mentioned earlier for powerlifting. Some more simple math (140/0.055) with the highest end of powerlifting injuries shows these children are 2,545x more likely to get injured from soccer than powerlifting. This common belief that weightlifting is uniquely and particularly dangerous for young athletes can’t seem be further from the truth when we take just a glace at the evidence provided. It’s absolutely outrageous that some parents are quietly judged or criticized for choosing to have their children lift weights and be healthy, rather than exposing them to the truly dangerous sports that are so widely accepted.
References
Davis, Danny. “What Age Is Safe for Kids to Start Weight Lifting.” Check Biotech First, 13 June 2019, checkbiotech.org/age-safe-kids-start-weight-lifting
Myers, Allison M, et al. “Resistance Training for Children and Adolescents.” Translational Pediatrics, U.S. National Library of Medicine, July 2017, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5532191
Radelet, Marirose. Survey of the Injury Rate for Children in Community Sports, 01 September 2002, https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/110/3/e28/64195/Survey-of-the-Injury-Rate-for-Children-in
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
I listed your References alphabetically.
This is a strong draft, ChefRat, with lots of room for improvement.
Right now it’s a 1000-word combination of DefCat/Causal/Rebuttal argument all rolled into one. As such, it will benefit from better organization to keep readers on track.
You want to identify certain characteristics of weightlifting, of childhood development, and of athletic activities and FIND WELL-SUPERVISED WEIGHTLIFTING in the beneficial section all of those categories.
Definition/Categorical Claims you appear to be making in Paragraph 1:
Definition/Categorical Claims you appear to be making in Paragraph 2:
You FAIL TO MAKE THAT COMPARISON OBVIOUS. Your language gets vague when it should be very explicit.
You say:
So, ChefRat, what would work better as a 2nd paragraph in a Definition/Categorical argument?
You want to identify Weightlifting as the best possible regimen for a youthful athlete to pursue to PROMOTE HEALTHY BONE DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH, right?
What would the BEST ACTIVITY look like, judging from its characteristics?
What would the WORST ACTIVITY look like, judging from its characteristics?
You seem to want to make comparisons like these, ChefRat, but your sentences don’t make CLEAR CLAIMS. They hint about differences between lifting and other activities without spelling out the CLEAR ADVANTAGES of lifting and the OBVIOUS DANGERS of other sorts of physical activity.
Ready for another round? Make your revisions and drop this right back into Feedback Please. Provisionally graded. Ask for a Regrade following any significant improvements.
Be prepared to completely overhaul your first and last paragraphs, which don’t accomplish much.
After posting this edit of the rewrite on 10.20.24, I feel like my closing statement is weak and could be stronger. I’m sure you’ll let me know of any critiques of the essay as a whole but I’d be particularly open to having a guideline to follow for closing statements. Please share them with me!
You’ve collected compelling statistical evidence comparing injury rates for several sports, ChefRat, but you leave it to readers to draw the right conclusions.
The trouble is the measurements aren’t “equalized” to make them easy to follow.
Injury rates for common youth sports were >1 per 100 athletes for just one event, as founded by this survey of injury rates.
—Interpret that for your readers. If 50 players participate in an average youth football game, will 1 player be injured for every two games played? If a game takes 3 hours to play, is that one injury per 100 players per every 3 hours of football? Roughly 33 injuries for every 100 hours of football or gymnastics. Am I doing that right?
Weightlifting on the other hand has two studies that were found within this scientific literature state that children and adolescents who practiced powerlifting for 100 hours had an injury rate of 0.053 to 0.055, the other study at an even lower number of 0.035.
—What’s the comparable number of injuries for every 100 hours of lifting? I read that a 1/20th of an injury per 100 hours of lifting. Right?
And that would make lifting 660 times less likely to result in injury?
If you’re looking for a strong conclusion, make your readers see how dramatic these numbers are.
Your paragraphs are too long.
They contain MORE THAN ONE MAIN IDEA each.
Don’t bother counting words, but whenever you SHIFT YOUR FOCUS or INTRODUCE A NEW TOPIC, enter a paragraph break.
Then, when all the breaks are in place, review each paragraph to see if it develops its MAIN IDEA thoroughly.
That’s what I’m talking about! 🙂
Thank you professor ! 😊