FAQ: What age can my daughter start lifting weights?
Answer …
It totally depends. I always recommend that any player have a solid base of physical fitness in place before they start working with weights.
That can come in a variety of ways. But working your overall athleticism and functional fitness FIRST is ideal.
Then, even after that, when you ARE ready to incorporate weights, it’s STILL critical to do “supplementary” training.
I always say, strength training DONE RIGHT, will increase your speed, explosiveness, AND strength while reducing your risk for injury.
That DONE RIGHT part is key because I’ve seen players weight train during the off season and come back more muscled up, but SLOWER than they were before! They lost speed and flexibility which completely nullified and “strength” gain they may have experienced.
My 3 oldest daughters have all competed in powerlifting. One is a World Record holder in powerlifting and the other 2 are American Record holders.
All 3 have increased speed and explosiveness along with strength to really boost their athletic performance in other sports.
BUT, that happened #1 because they already had a solid base of athleticism and functional strength and #2 because when they added weights, they did just that, ADD, not REPLACE their other training.
It is absolutely critical that you keep doing your functional/core strength training if you add weights to your training (or ever want to).
When my kids lift, only about 20% of it is “lifting” as most people think of it.
The OTHER 80% is all accessory work! Those “accessory” exercises are designed to increase muscular balance within the body while also building core strength amongst all the small stabilizer muscles throughout the body.
Skipping that part, and just using weights, is asking for an injury to happen.
You cannot just strengthen the main, larger muscles groups while ignoring the smaller supporting muscles and think #1 that you’ll maximize your strength and #2 that you’ll do so safely.
That’s highly unlikely.
And machine work is the WORST at helping you avoid this less than ideal scenario.
All of this is why I reached out to Barry Lovelace and asked him if we could offer his BEST softball training workouts in a preseason training program this year.
I’m always telling people what they need to do if they want to get stronger for softball (or want to help their kids do so).
This year decided that I actually want to work WITH you to get it done! Not just talk to you about it.
So Barry took his top softball training programs and combined them into one kick butt preseason training program that will help ANY softball player.
This is exactly the kind of training that’s a must for maximizing performance while reducing risk of injury on the field (whether you’re lifting weights or not and, especially, if you eventually want to incorporate “weight training” one day).
Not only that, but each of us has set aside time, beginning January 18th, 2016 to coach you through the program right here on Facebook 🙂
Support, accountability, feedback, and extra training tips will all be available to you throughout the entire program 🙂
Join us here …
StacieMahoe.com/powerup
Registration ends January 8th! Grab your spot today 🙂
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