Fitness and Weight Lifting for Children

My personal beliefs on fitness and weight lifting is it has a lot to do with studies that have been done on adolescence and the first saying is with boys and girls shown through studies that weight training especially can be harmful to kids before the ages of 14 or 15 when they haven't fully developed in their growth.

So we recommend the kids really start lifting weights maybe into the freshman year, starting into the soft more junior seasons. A weight program for high school girls for lacrosse would typically be something that goes 3-4 days a week every other day and working the muscle group that would be something that lacrosse players use on a regular basis.

The leg muscles are especially important, it's something gets overlooked quite a bit. Girls a lot of times like to try to work the abs and muscles that aren't necessarily what you want to use. We try to enforce that they use their hamstrings and the quadriceps and try to build strength in those areas which really helps with muscle pulls.

And also a very common injury among girls is shin splints so we try to work the tibialis anterior muscle and the gastrocnemius which is the calf muscle in order to develop those legs so they can run and endure practice 5-6 days a week during the spring.

For younger kids, a weight training is something that again we don't recommend at all because of the development within their growth, within middle school, conditioning something that should be done probably 6-8 weeks prior to the season, it could still be cardiovascular conditioning, some sprint work just to kind of get ready for the season, but nothing that is really long distance, anything that's long distance takes away from your quickness. So at the maximum maybe 1-2 miles when you are doing a type of distance run.


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