Originally published in Village Eye Magazine:
So, your 16 year old is now old enough to use a gym and has expressed an interest in fitness. Here are some things to consider while guiding them on their fitness journey:
Keep it health focused:
When young people make good exercise choices, this will enhance their health and longevity for the rest of their years. When they focus on health first, the other things they might want to get from training such as improved self-esteem will come naturally. Someone who I trained from the age of 16 recently said this to me: “Steve, I really value my leg exercises, because I remember you telling me that having the biggest biceps in the world won’t stop me getting arthritis in my knees later in life, and that’s why it’s important to train my legs”.
Balance is everything:
I saw a “full body” workout that an Instagram Influencer posted to their account a while back. It was so skewed towards exercises that trained the muscles on the front of the body, that if anyone followed that workout for any appreciable length of time, they would end up with distorted posture and sore shoulders. It’s important for young people to understand that all of the muscles in their body are important, not just the ones they can see in the mirror, or that the media has told them are important. All muscles should be trained equally and in balance.
Be wary of split routines:
When a young person first ventures into the weights area, they’ll often start training different muscles on each day, training each muscle once a week. That’s what the routines on the internet and magazines show most often. A better approach is to use 2-3 full body workouts per week. When we start resistance training, our body goes through a 6-8 week learning period where it learns to co-ordinate its muscles and nerves more efficiently. By training the whole body each session rather than just part of it, we expose our muscles to the movements it needs to get better at more frequently. This results in faster progress, and it’s also a better technique for sports conditioning.
Young people are exposed to more information than ever before, but establishing the focus on training for health early on will help them to sort the good information from the less useful and set healthy foundations for the rest of their lives.
-Steve Shreeve