Manchester has just handed free gym memberships to 11-to-16-year-olds. Hyrox now runs "Youngstars" races for children as young as eight. And the industry has greeted all this with the warm, uncritical applause normally reserved for puppies and tax cuts, because who could possibly be against healthy children?
Me. Hi. Pull up a foam roller.
Now, before you sharpens your pitchfork — let me kill a myth, because I refuse to die on a stupid hill. Strength training does not stunt children's growth or detonate their growth plates. The American Academy of Pediatrics is emphatic: supervised, age-appropriate lifting is safe, builds bone density, and reduces injury. Kids moving load is good. Marvellous. So that's not my problem.
My problem is the three little words all that evidence quietly depends on: supervised, controlled, technique-first. And then I look at what we've actually built, and weep gently into my pre-workout.
Youngstars is a race. Against a clock. For a time on a public leaderboard. Eight stations — SkiErg, sled push, sled drag, burpee broad jumps, row, farmers carry, lunges, wall balls — strung together with 200-metre runs or more. And a stopwatch, being a stopwatch, rewards the precise opposite of good form: a knackered child hurling a wall ball overhead for the fiftieth time for the buzzer, not the technique; burpee broad jumps — which is a posh way of saying "repeated landings" — performed with the structural integrity of a deckchair because it's a race; a sled dragged like it owes them money because the kid in the next lane is quicker. This is not where careful movement lives. This is where careful movement gets its lunch taken.
And here's the bit that actually keeps me up at night, from my own years in athletics. I've watched a long, sad parade of child prodigies — the anointed ones, the certs — become absolute nobodies by twenty. Not bad luck. Overuse. Too much, too soon, too often, one stress fracture and one shredded tendon at a time. And that was just running. I’ve spent the last 15 years with some of my events trying to explain why a 12 year old shouldn’t do a half marathon, or why a 6 year old can’t do a Mactuff Mud Run on their own. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against competition, the values of winning and losing at an early age are the kind of mettle that builds character. And I don’t give out trophies for last place (though one year we did give a crate of beer to one particularly awful adult football team that had spent the whole season getting slaughtered each game. That was pretty much a thank you for playing out the season against considerable adversity.
But back to the subject matter in hand.. Now we're bolting on sleds, weighted carries and overhead throws, on a race calendar, with a free 12-week plan thoughtfully provided to crank up the volume,... for 8 year olds. So, genuine question: are we taking a danger the endurance world knows like an old enemy — and politely adding weight to it?
Supervision, you ask? At a Youngstars race the child is handed over at the start line and the parents are politely waved off behind the fence, close enough to watch, too far to say "elbows in." And Hyrox is only now folding the whole thing into its coaching certification — the corporate equivalent of fitting the smoke alarms after the housewarming. Manchester's freebie has the same flaw in a bigger room: an unsupervised adult gym floor is precisely where the word "supervised" goes to quietly expire.
The fix isn't a ban. It's growing up. Coach the movement before you time it. Supervise like you mean it. And maybe — wild idea — let kids' exercise stay play a bit longer before we hand them a finisher's medal and a lifelong knee twinge.
The goal was never to manufacture eight-year-old athletes. It was to build forty-year-olds who still move — which rather depends on not snapping them in half at fourteen.
So: lifelong movers, or very young competitors?
