Are Children Weaker than Ever? Recently Published Review Says Yes, and It’s a Problem

The paper aimed to create an overview of inactivity in children, discussing the factors that drive physical inactivity and offer insight into why strength training is so valuable for young people. It looked at many studies to consolidate research into youth activity, fitness and strength, and painted a pretty scary picture of what’s happening.

As this wasn’t an experiment, researchers didn’t lay out any results specifically, but some of the most notable points from the report are:

• Children with strength deficits may be less likely to withstand the demands of classic ‘rough and tumble play’, leading to more injuries in daily life.
• Young people who are active but still lack strength are at risk of suffering a sport-related injury and are less likely to reach elite-level performance. The ability to perform a 1-rep maximum squat of 105% of their body mass has been shown to reduce the risk of knee injuries in girls.
• Muscular weakness tends to continue into adulthood, meaning children won’t outgrow their deficits and will carry the health impact of a lack of strength into older age.
• Weakness creates a dangerous cycle: weak children feel less confident to engage in exercise and sport, which means many avoid non-essential physical activity so they don’t experience failure, humiliation and injury. In turn, this makes them even weaker, and the cycle continues.
• Weaker youth are more likely to spend time watching television, playing video games or using smartphones, which are related to poor health outcomes and increased healthcare costs.

It’s tempting to say you simply need to get your kids moving more. However, a social and political shift is needed in the way we think about muscular fitness, say the authors, as physical activity levels are hard to change without accessible interventions that recognise the importance of life-long strength.

Resistance training is the best workout for inactive young people, because those who are inactive are often unwilling and unable to perform long bouts of aerobic training.

Meanwhile, well-designed resistance training workouts, including pushing, pulling and rotation/anti-rotation exercises, can help them build skills and confidence while reducing the risk of injury. Hopefully, after getting stronger, they will feel more able to go on to play competitive sports – or run around with friends like you used to.

If young people are not regularly doing strength-building activities, they will face the ‘iceberg of youth physical development’. This is the theory that weaker children with poor strength skills are unable to overcome these barriers, meaning their movement can’t progress to more ‘mature’ skills.

It’s not a positive one: the state of play for kids is bad. We need to better support our children to move more – and we need better access to programmes that will help them be stronger, fitter and happier.