Short answer: yes — done properly, it’s not just safe, it’s protective. The idea that strength work stunts growth or damages growth plates has been examined for decades, and the major sports-medicine and strength organisations (the American Academy of Pediatrics and the NSCA among them) have landed in the same place: supervised, technique-first resistance training is safe for children and adolescents, improves performance, and — this is the part parents rarely hear — reduces injury risk, because stronger muscles and tendons take load that would otherwise land on joints and growth plates.
Where did the myth come from? Old case reports of kids hurt lifting heavy weights — unsupervised, with bad technique, near maximum loads. Which points at the real finding:
The danger was never the strength work. It’s speed, sloppiness, and ego. A young athlete moving slowly through a controlled squat is doing one of the safest things in sport. The same athlete throwing a barbell around to impress someone is not.
What safe youth strength work looks like:
- Own body first. Squats, lunges, planks, bridges, calf raises — years of progress live there before any equipment is needed. The strength & control routine is built exactly this way.
- Technique is the load. Slow down, control every rep; if the form goes, the set is over. A three-second lower does more than a fast one.
- Progress by control, not by weight. Two legs → one leg. Longer holds. Slower tempo. That ladder is long and safe.
- No maxing. There is no reason for a growing athlete to find their one-rep max. None.
For a footballer, the payoff is direct: strength is the engine under speed, and tendon tolerance is the insurance policy against the growth-plate complaints — heel and knee — that actually do interrupt seasons.
So the question worth asking isn’t whether a young player should do strength work. It’s whether the strength work they’re doing is slow, controlled, and boring enough to be doing them good.