Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple

It's just that it wasn't done.

And so people weren't teaching teenage girls how to lift weights.

And there's a lot of advantages to that, especially if you're playing sports, because we have female athletes who are

teenagers and then going into college and continuing to play their sports.

And there can be not only a performance improvement, but also an injury reduction from doing some resistance training along with your sports-specific training.

So I think it's certainly valuable to start younger, also from a habit-building perspective.

perspective, because I know, you know, if you're somebody who has gone decades without ever doing a lot of structured exercise or without ever lifting weights, it can feel kind of daunting and intimidating to learn the new skill.

That said, we know that you can gain muscle

anytime, even if you start at 70.

So it's not that it's ever too late to start.

But if we start earlier, we are building muscle in the way that you're building a savings account or a retirement account.

Because if we're not lifting weights, and if we're not physically active, then we do start to lose muscle with age.

And later in life, it does become a problem.

Yeah.

I mean, I think if we see a young kid doing a barbell squat, there's something kind of jarring about that.

But think about all the kids we see all the time, you know, on the monkey bars, essentially doing pull-ups or muscle-ups and developing a lot of upper body strength.

And certainly young kids,

Gymnasts have been doing that for a very long time.

So it's not that there isn't any sort of resistance training going around or happening in childhood.

It's just not the structured training that we think when we talk about lifting weights.