What Kinds Of Gym Work Should Teenagers Undertake?

If you have children, you may be very keen that they live a healthy and active lifestyle, especially if you aspire to this yourself. However, you need to consider carefully what gym equipment will suit them best.

As an adult and a parent, you will have a different physical situation to your children. You will no longer be growing and, once you get into your 30s, there will be an increasing need to work within growing physical constraints as you age.

Everyone has to work within their limitations, including their current fitness level, particularly for beginners. For many youngsters, a certain level of fitness might have been a given a generation ago when they were more physically active, but this is less true now.

Why Do Children Need To Exercise More?

For example, the most recent NHS figures on childhood obesity (for 2024) indicated that:

- Between 12.6 per cent and 17.7 per cent of children aged two to 15 were likely to be obese

- Between 22.8 per cent and 29.6 per cent were likely to be overweight or obese

- On a more positive note, the levels of childhood obesity appear to have peaked in the mid-2000s before falling.

Nonetheless, the level of excess weight in children is still a major cause for concern. However, it was notable that excessive weight in children usually occurred when this was also an issue for their parents.

That suggests, in turn, that fitter parents will have fitter children, which suggests lifestyle factors have a big role to play. If you like to do sports, exercise a lot and do gym exercises, getting your children to do likewise can help them grow strong, fit and healthy.

What Role Can Dumbbells Play In Getting Youngsters Fit And Strong?

However, you don’t want them to get injured with the wrong equipment. Clearly, you can’t expect a young child or even a teenager to use heavy equipment designed for adult use.

A good example of the sort of equipment you could use is an adjustable dumbbell set. It is designed to have its weight varied, so while you may use it at its heaviest, it can be much lighter for your teenagers to use.

Indeed, these are always useful for anyone who is a beginner in gym work, as it means you can start light and then work your way up to heavier weights as your muscle strength builds up.

PureGym’s recommended exercises for teenagers include some workouts involving dumbbells. These include:

- Deadlifts

- Squats

- Bench presses

- Overhead presses

- Shoulder presses

These are particularly useful for building up general bone and muscle strength. The article notes that this is an investment in future health, as it reduces the chances of your youngsters suffering from conditions like osteoporosis and fractures in later life.

Indeed, this is an important time to do it, as bones in particular are subject to some of the most rapid growth spurts during this period of life.

Of course, gym work isn’t just about strength. Other exercises that can be undertaken will include:

- Cardio exercises

- Squats

- Press-ups

- Planks

- Star jumps

Among the wider benefits are not just greater fitness, but improved sleep, better mental health and enhanced academic performance due to better concentration.

What Does A Balanced Fitness Programme For Teenagers Look Like?

Many gyms, such as PureGym, do not admit anyone under the age of 16, which may be wise for various reasons, but a great benefit of having your own home gym is that it is a place where you may gently introduce your own younger children to gym work.

For example, The Fit Manual has published a teen workout plan that can be used at home.

The sequence it advises is based around a normal week and works as follows:

- Monday will be based on strength work using exercise machines

- Tuesday will be a non-gym day but with exercise like brisk walking or sport at school

- Squats and sit-ups on Wednesday

- Rest or active recovery with stretches or yoga on Thursday

- Friday is the day when they do work with weights

- Saturday is for fun exercise like hiking, dancing or sports

- Sunday is the rest day

What this shows is that the programme won’t all be about weights, but they can be used as part of a wider, balanced programme of exercises that will help your youngsters get fit and strong from a young age without doing anything to excess.

It also highlights an important fact for those who are under-16s: That at this stage of life, all-round fitness is the thing they should be aiming at.

That means balancing the use of gym equipment with more common non-gym activities like playing sports, going for brisk walks, hiking or dancing.

Right now, the aim should be to establish fitness, inculcate good habits and set them up for life.

How Will Being Fit And Strong As Teens Help Your Youngsters In The Future?

Indeed, it may be that some of these other activities will become their most regular go-to means of staying fit and active in future, for example, if they decide they want to go hiking up and down mountains at weekends or play a sport regularly.

If so, gym work may still be a part of their future activity, but as a means of supporting what they do.

For example, exercise bikes can be beneficial as a means of building up strength for those who love to cycle a lot, while weights can still help those who will benefit from greater arm and upper body strength in their sports, such as rugby, football and cricket.

On the other hand, it may be that they do choose to spend a lot of time in the gym and their physique in adult life will be that of a bodybuilder, or display ripped abs.

If so, the dumbbells will have proven to be a useful starting point, with further investments to come in other weights to help build up those muscles further.

However, even if they do none of these things to any great extent, getting your youngsters to do some gym work at a key time when they are growing physically will bring health benefits that will last them for life.