With a child of my own interested in running a marathon, I researched marathon training programs for youth in the US (there are some!), injury rates and how these compare to high school running programs.
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I’m sort of interested in this. The last time I looked at this issue I believe the consensus was that there is no pre-adolescent training effect, so just let kids run in an unstructured way for fun. When puberty hits, you get a training effect, but hard training should wait until the growth plate closes. I’d be interested if there were updated advice.
My guess some of the lower injury rates with endurance training with youth is the emphasis is on volume and not intensity.
In my son’s case, he been practicing longer runs for a year before he tried a marathon. The base training did seem give him going to a formal middle school training program later.
Now he’s sophomore and has good success in the school running programs without major injuries.
Anecdote meet singular data point.
Meanwhile, lifetime injuries from overtraining too young and agonizing pain. So… maybe we both choose medical data instead of what happened to our immediate singular data points.
Which… drum roll… says what the original guy said.
The article references were sourced from a number of formal studies, I’ve collected some of them in another comment if you’d like to review or add to the list. https://lemmy.world/post/52372548/26040691
If you see my other comment the volume is actually where the risk lies. There is generally no problem with kids doing close to 100% VO2max or HR for extended periods. They’ll just get pooped and quit before they can do any damage. It’s the repetitive stress of 10s of thousands of foot strikes that can put immature tissues at risk.
Notably bones aren’t fully calcified and growth plates are open at the end of the long bones. There isn’t really a good understanding of what stress and exercise induced inflammation do to developing tissues…at least that I’m aware of.
Edited for autocorrect. 😡
A little while ago I was working on a youth soccer certification. They talked a bit about the differences in warm-up/cool-downs related to different age groups. They didn’t go too deep into but said roughly what you were describing. Pre-adolescent didn’t really need much in the way of warm-up/cool-down and you could/should just “let 'em play”. It wasn’t until later that you didn’t to be more on-task with that kind of thing to avoid injury.
Young people are strange beasts for sure. It’s useful to get good habits ingrained I guess, but they don’t really need warm ups. I’m not sure adults do either quite frankly. It seems just going easy for a while before you get into the hard stuff is good enough.
Stretching is another thing. I’m old enough that stretching advice has gone full circle twice since I’ve been around. From ballistic stretching good to bad, long slow static stretching bad to good to bad again, and stretch before to only after to before and after again. And there was the craze for oppositional engagement for a while where you tense the muscle opposite the target muscle, and the reciprocal inhibition would allow a deeper stretch of the target. I don’t know what to do a out stretching. I just know I hate it and do less of it than I should.
I wonder if we should ask the best runners in the world.
https://ourkenya.com/Sports/Why-Kenya-Runs
“Running culture begins in childhood. Kenyan children run to school, sometimes covering 10-15 kilometers daily by age eight. This is not training in the modern sense but transportation and play. These miles build aerobic capacity in a critical window of development, creating a deep physiological base that European or American distance runners, who typically begin systematic training in their teens, never develop. Barefoot running, which was standard in rural Kenya until the 1990s, develops foot strength and proprioception differently than shoe-dependent running. By the time a Kenyan runner reaches age 16 and begins formal athletics training, they have accumulated 100,000+ unplanned running miles.”
Timothy Noakes worked in Kenya for decades with elite runners. While running is part of the culture, running success is not. There is a strong genetic component tied to the Kalenjin (sp.) people. Again, the issue here is not whether children should run - they should. The issue is whether they should train for long distances.
The issue of barefoot vs shoed running is well studied at this point and I’d refer anyone interested I the work to Benno Nigg’s Human Performance Lab as a resource. Basically it matters much less than you might think. Minimal shoes/barefoot running works for a subset of the population and small frames and light body mass contribute. Barefoot runners will also move injury from knee to foot and ankle.
There’s also the Tarahumara of Mexico, another culture where running is a normal mode of transportation. Folks may remember the iconic story of some of the Tarahumara running in the Leadville 100-mile mountain race and winning one year… while racing in traditional sandals!
Well… “Traditional sandals” of an Indian aunty are for sure different than the ones of a culture of distance running
So now that there is a story linked…the story misses the point. The issue is not acute injury, which is what the article discusses, but long-term injury by over training adolescents before they are ready.
Marathon training involves base training to bring up mileage to a minimum number (we can debate what that number is, but it’s over 20 miles a week). Base training is followed by a 16-20 week cycle of increasing mileage and increasing the length of individual runs. Training will involve at least 3 runs over 3 hours in length. At a cadence of 180 foot strikes a minute each of those long runs produces 10,800 foot strikes an hour or somewhere from 30,000-40,000 foot strikes in a single session. And there will be 3 or 4 other sessions in a week.
Is that something developing bones should be exposed to? What are the long-term implications of exposing open growth plates, partially calcified bone, and immature connective tissues to high loads of repetitive stress?
Running has taken generally taken a conservative approach and limited mileage for younger participants. High schoolers focus on short distances, generally under 5000 m.
Here’s a summary of references for the post. You may be interesting in the first two, a sort of meta-analysis and the second one, a podcast interview between two pediatricians on the topic. One concludes "I have more concerns about some of the cross country runners and the volume that they do as opposed to people who are running a marathon… if it’s done properly it could be safe."
If there are other useful journal articles on the topic I missed, link them in a comment below. Thanks!
References
- Beyond the Finish Line: Examining the Role of Children in Marathon Races. From March, 2024, it’s a great introduction to related scientific studies, reviewing a number of prior studies with cited sources.
- Should Kids Run Marathon? Pediatric Sports Medicine Podcast episode with Dr. Mark Halstead and Dr. Joel Brenner in 2022
- Review of 26 years of youth marathon data from the Twin Cities Marathon by William Roberts
- Girls suffer more overuse injuries in teen sports
- High school cross country running injuries: a longitudinal study
- Youth Marathon Training: Injury Epidemiology & Risk Factors by Joshua Goldman in 2019
- Running Marathons in High School: A 5-Year Review of Injury in a Structured Training Program
Are you a bot? The references deal with acute injury like I said in my reply. Keep your AI slop answers out of discussions.
lol, no bot. That’s my list of references I gathered for the article. The publisher trimmed the section out of the final publication. I’ll renew my invitation to share other journal articles you’ve found on the topic.
Sorry Jesus. I’ll take the snark down a dozen notches. Jack Daniels has a lot of stuff about optimal training for youth - he did a lot of high school development work but he was performance focused rather than injury focused. I’ll take a look in the book case and see what I can find. Tim Noakes is always a good starting point (although he is very out of fashion these days).
Full disclosure: this is not my area of expertise. I was an organ physiologist who was serious about running for many years. So I was sort of professionally adjacent to these guys and paid attention to the literature, but I am not a subject expert.
If they qualify, why not?
No, exercise is good but the extremes athletes put their bodies through is not healthy; is bad for developing bodies, and the changes and consequences are often not even discussed for any kind of consent. In example i recall the story of a woman dealing with chronic pain because she wanted to be a dancer when she was 6 and her parents just signed her up with no discussion.
Also in contrast trans kids tend to be constantly warned of the effects and changes yet get discouraged, gate kept, gaslit, and abused more often than affirmed.
No one is suggesting forcing kids to run extreme distances.
‘Andrew! You’ve got to be number one! I won’t tolerate any losers in this family! Your intensity is for shit! Win! Win! Win!’ You son of a bitch. You know, sometimes I wish my knee would give. And I wouldn’t be able to wrestle anymore. And he could forget all about me.
I think you’re missing a link as there just looks to be an image and nothing else.
Thank you! I entered a URL into Lemmy and then selected an image, which apparently this replaced the URL… fixed now!
