Interest in when you can start full-fledged weight training is fully justified, if only for the reason that the need for additional physical activity is inherent in the human body at any age, and especially in adolescence. Excess energy just begs to be released and the best way to use it in the best possible way is to do bodybuilding. But when starting training, it is important to take into account the characteristics of your age, otherwise you should not expect high sports results and good health in the future.

Many argue that training at a young age is not interesting and does not bring noticeable results, but this is not true. On the contrary, by devoting a little time to training, young men aged 14-16 can achieve quite serious athletic performance in a relatively short time, including in the appearance of their own muscles. At least an athletic posture, a powerful chest and the ability to fully control his own body are provided to him.

Young men in their training must adhere to simple rules, mainly dictated by the age characteristics of a young, still weak in physiological and anatomical terms of the organism. And of course common sense.

It is necessary to build workouts in such a way that they do not deplete the resources of an actively growing organism. Violating this axiom, one may later face such problems as growth retardation and premature ossification of the skeleton. It must be remembered that training at a young age can be beneficial, but only if the costs for them are comparable to the recovery capabilities of a particular organism.

A growing body requires a considerable amount of energy for its development and physical growth, and exhausting heavy workouts can deplete it ahead of time simply by simply depriving it of strength. Therefore, training like professional bodybuilders under the age of 16 is not worth it. It is better to build a training program guided by your own physical condition and the state of the body as a whole. To do this, it is enough to train in short series of 20-30 minutes 2-3 times a week.

Daily training will not bring more noticeable results, and possibly lead to overtraining, complete stagnation or even a rollback of the results achieved, which should never be allowed. Also, when compiling a training program, it is extremely important to exclude from it exercises that directly affect the spinal column. This list includes exercises...

1. Deadlift
2. Barbell Squats
3. Standing press
4. Bent over row

Deadlifts should be replaced with hyperextensions, barbell squats should be replaced with bodyweight squats (air squats). Bent over rows are best seen with pull-ups on the bar. Legs are better to swing in simulators.

Each exercise is quite enough to perform in two or three approaches, sometimes performing one approach at all, allowing the body to recover more than usual.

The number of repetitions should be within 12-15. At the same time, it is appropriate to perform approaches with the preservation of strength, that is, to train not to complete failure, which can significantly affect the fragile nervous system, exhausting the body of a young athlete.

Each muscle must be worked out once a week. At the same time, one race in 6-8 weeks, and when signs of fatigue appear even more often, it is important to take long breaks of 7-10 days. Such a rest will only benefit - the hormonal system will recover, and with it the muscles will recover. This approach will allow the young growing organism to fully develop.

An excellent option could be a training program that includes push-ups from the floor, push-ups on the uneven bars, pull-ups, hyperextensions, squats with your own weight.

When choosing one or another version of the training program, it is imperative to take into account the total energy consumption per day, these include classes at school. In all cases, you need to eat well and be sure to get enough sleep. Nutrition and sleep should cover the costs of training, learning and maintaining the physiological needs of a young growing body.

I will never forget my first bodybuilding goal when I was only 15 years old. I thought that by doing everything according to the instructions, training hard and following the right bodybuilding diet, in 3-4 months I would look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Despite the fact that during the summer I achieved very good results, I still did not even come close to my idol.

Unrealistic bodybuilding goals are one of the many mistakes young athletes make in their first days of training. In this article, I will tell you about the main mistakes that are made in the early stages of bodybuilding and how they can be avoided.

Teen Mistake #1: Unrealistic Bodybuilding Goals

By far, one of the most common mistakes among teen athletes is unrealistic expectations. As I said, I made such a mistake myself when I first started bodybuilding. I can’t say exactly how much muscle you can build, as it happens at different rates for everyone, but I can say with confidence that if you manage to get 10 kg of pure muscle mass in the first year of training, then you are a natural athlete.

It takes a lot of time to build a champion body, as well as the consistent use of a good bodybuilding training program, proper diet and rest. Bodybuilding is an activity where you need to be patient. To make sure that you are following the right path, it is enough to track your progress. My advice is to take a photo of yourself every 4 weeks, keep track of your weight and measurements. Thus, you will see in which direction "your body is moving" and, if necessary, correct your program. A picture is "worth a thousand words" and you'll be amazed how much more a picture can tell you about your progress than just simple measurements.

Teen Mistake #2: Lack of Consistency

Some boys think that after a few weeks of hard training they can sit back for a week or two and then go back to the gym and pick up where they left off. Unfortunately, they will be disappointed. Lack of consistency will set them back in time and have to start all over again.

Be relentless and consistent with every aspect of your program (training, diet and rest). In the end, it is consistency that will become your one of the strongest allies in bodybuilding.

Teen Mistake #3: Unplanned Workout

I have watched the picture many times when teenagers wander around the gym, grab all the exercises in a row and do what they can. Neither rhyme nor reason. This is not only a path to mediocre results, but the possibility of injury. It is very important to have a good workout plan with you before going to the gym. Take a look at the articles in the For Beginners section for more information on exactly what a good bodybuilding training program should look like.

Teen Mistake #4: Following the Champion Program

Another serious mistake that most teenagers make in bodybuilding. Such a training schedule is too complicated for young bodybuilders. Only after 10 years of training in bodybuilding does an athlete know how his body responds best to training. Advanced bodybuilding programs focus on strengthening the weak parts of the body while maintaining the strong parts. In addition, the Pro program has more isolation exercises, which is not suitable for teenagers at all. Finally, the volume and frequency of Pro training is significantly higher.

A pro program from a hardened athlete can eventually lead to overtraining in one area and at the same time detraining in another. Also large volumes and high intensity can lead to serious injury.

Teen Mistake #5: Incorrect Exercises

Again, a mistake that happens when teenagers use more advanced workout programs. The muscle building program should be short (maximum 1 hour) and focus mainly on free weight exercises. Frequent use of isolation machines will lead to poor results, if any.

Teen Mistake #6: Too Much Weight and Improper Execution

Most ambitious teenage athletes use heavy weights in their exercises to achieve maximum results. In my opinion, teenagers should not strive for large volumes, since at this age muscle growth occurs much faster than the growth of tendons and ligaments. "Survive maximum" usually leads to injury, especially if the correct execution technique is not used. Keep in mind that in bodybuilding, weight is just a means to an end. We use the weight as a tool to induce controlled tension on the muscles and thereby induce hypertrophy (muscle growth).

We are not powerlifters. Focus on doing the right 8-15 reps per set and you will be amazed at the results of doing exercises with safe light weights.

Teen Mistake #7: Poor Diet

Sometimes a situation arises when young athletes do not make all the above mistakes, but still cannot make significant progress. And the reason for this is a bad diet. Don't forget that mental preparation initiates the process of muscle growth, but it is diet that fuels this growth. Without the right materials, it is not possible to build anything. This statement is true for bodybuilders as well. No food - No growth.

Teen Mistake #8: Eating Everything

Too many calories (especially from simple fats and sugars) will just make you fat. You only need a slight calorie surplus to gain quality muscle. Follow a structured meal plan (diet examples). Remember, six small meals a day at 2-3 hour intervals, consisting of complex carbohydrates (brown rice, oatmeal) for energy, protein (chicken, fish) for muscle building, small amounts of fat (olive and flaxseed oil) for ensuring good hormonal levels.

Teen Mistake #9: Lack of Sleep

Most teenagers prefer not to sleep until late at night, sitting at the computer or meeting with friends, especially during holidays and weekends. It must be remembered that muscle growth occurs at night when you sleep. By depriving yourself of sleep, you lower your hormonal levels (your natural steroid production), which will cost you valuable growth. If you give part of your life to bodybuilding, then you need to take sleep more seriously. A daily night's sleep of 8-9 hours will give you maximum growth. The minimum you can afford is 7 hours.

Teen Mistake #10: Expecting Supplements to Do Everything for You

Teenagers fool themselves into thinking that supplements are the most important part of bodybuilding. The key to success in bodybuilding is based on three constants: Training, Nutrition, Rest. Therefore, stop chasing the latest discoveries that "allow you to get 10 kg of muscle in 1 month" and focus on real things. You also need to stick to proven supplements that really work and are essential for training, such as multivitamins, essential fats, and protein powders. For the most advanced teen athletes who have been training for more than three years, creatine and glutamine can be your very strong allies in the fight for results.

Now that you know what are the most common bodybuilding mistakes teenagers make, try not to fall victim to them.

Every year bodybuilding becomes more popular. Today, people understand that having a beautiful body is not only fashionable, but also very healthy. Some beginners start exercising in the gym as early as adolescence. Of course, it is almost impossible to avoid mistakes at the beginning of the journey, but we believe that with the right approach, you can make your workouts very effective even at the beginning. In this article, we will talk about bodybuilding for teenagers, look at common mistakes and give general recommendations on the training method.

Before you start lifting weights, you must definitely develop some kind of base. Speaking of the base, we mean the ability to train with your own weight. Before starting classes in the gym, it is desirable that you can pull yourself up on the horizontal bar at least 10 times and push up from the uneven bars more than 15 times. In this case:

• You will not be ashamed of your low strength indicators;
• Your joints and ligaments will be prepared to work with additional weights;
• You will be able to build muscle mass faster due to the presence of neuromuscular connections.

After exercising on the horizontal bars and visiting the gym, do not rush to work with maximum weights. The next step is to learn the correct technique for doing the exercises, many teenagers skip this step and therefore their progress is not too fast compared to those who know the technique. Also, beginners who do not know the execution technique are very often injured. Therefore, the first month in the gym should be devoted to studying the technique of the main basic exercises (squat, bench press, traction) and the development of muscle feeling. We call muscle feeling the ability to emphasize the load on one muscle group in certain exercises. For example, in the bench press, professional athletes are able to partially turn off the triceps from work, which is why the pectoral muscles are worked out much more efficiently. Developed muscle feeling will allow you to quickly increase muscle volume.

After a month of studying technique and working with light weights, it's time to move on to heavy basic work. In your arsenal of movements should be present only:

• On the legs -,;
• On the back - , ;
• On the chest - barbell or dumbbell presses on a bench with different angles of inclination;
• On the shoulders - and.

Basic exercises stimulate muscle growth much better than isolated work. In the first six months, there is no point in training muscle groups such as trapezium, arms, forearms or calves. All these small muscle groups, one way or another, will be involved in basic exercises, and therefore will grow. After six months of training in the gym, you can start adding a little isolation to the biceps, triceps, deltas, and chest to the basic work. You can follow your own training program or choose some ready-made plan from.

1) Don't take training advice seriously from inexperienced athletes. Take an example only from those comrades who have achieved a significant result. Also surround yourself with people who have the same interests as you. Often the inner circle of teenagers does not understand why you are training, many beginners give up and lose motivation because of this.

2) Be realistic. Get everything at once - it does not happen. If you gain 5kg of muscle mass in the first year of training, this is already a great success. Also know that during adolescence, a key condition for success in sports is the regularity of training. Lack of regularity will make your workouts ineffective.

3) Another major mistake is the lack of understanding of the correct technique for performing exercises. You can train wrong for a year and achieve nothing. To achieve a tangible result, you still have to go back to learning the technique. Value your time.

How to do bodybuilding as a teenager?

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Perhaps in bodybuilding you set "goals to the sky" and you want to achieve them "right now", but let me tell you one secret: you do not need to treat your passion as if it should make you money or make you famous and thereby help you. It should be something that just makes you happy, that gives you satisfaction. Bodybuilding is a great passion, a hobby, because it helps you stay healthy, lead a normal life.

Having said this, I understand that there will be someone who will find a lot of negativity in what has been said. My goal is to help you learn how to separate one from the other. I've been getting my knowledge of bodybuilding and muscle development longer than you live. I can't imagine a better reward than what your body can achieve with knowledge and experience.

If you were my son, I would give you exactly the same advice. Use this wisdom! If it helps you, you can think of me as "the friend or father you never had."

Tip 1 // Find a mentor

The advice to find a mentor, or someone who fits the role, is not a hard-but-quick advice. But after you go through what body transformation will require of you - especially for a competition - you will understand how important it is to have someone who shares your passions, inspires you, "pushes" you to move to the next level.

Your mentor doesn't have to be a professional or someone who competes at the national championship level, although they could very well be. The mentor may be older than you or your age. He may not even be someone who directly teaches you, helps you develop a training program or a nutrition plan - although he may well do all this for you.

What a mentor does for you is very vague, vague - and very important from a perspective. It helps you be more responsible. He keeps your interests at his heart and motivates you with his personality. It doesn't sound cool, but remember: bodybuilding is a lifestyle, more so than any other sport. You can become strong without someone's support, but it's hard for them to stay without it.

Tip 2 // Surround yourself with the “right people”

When bodybuilding is new to you, you are trying to learn something, grow, achieve your goals, the last thing you need is people around who do not "accept" what you are doing. Spending day after day around people who don't understand why you're exercising can cause you to lose motivation and stop "wasting time doing it."

This does not mean that close relationships with family and friends should be cut off. You just need to get to know the bodybuilders from your environment, the gym. Maintain relationships with those who understand what you are doing and why, with whom you can maintain friendly relations, exchange experiences. Bodybuilding is too difficult to do alone.

Tip 3 // Get information from reliable sources

There is so much information on the Internet about bodybuilding (and other things) that it is difficult for those who grew up in "pre-Internet times" to believe it. This is both good and bad at the same time. A lot of what you get by typing a simple query can be wrong. This will slow down progress, cause harm, and in the future may damage health.

This is especially true of social media and forums. Everyone on our planet is entitled to their own opinion, and there is no way to determine if they understand what they are talking about. One of the worst things you can do is post your meal plan or workout plan on a forum and ask for advice on it. Half will say that it's cool, and the second - that it's stupid. This will lead to the fact that you are confused and start jumping from program to program, based on the advice of complete strangers.

What could be the solution? Be skeptical, be patient. Find good, reputable bodybuilding resources. A site like muscle.rf can provide you with verified information based on research, years of experience. Avoid pseudo-scientific information (in the style of “7 seconds before the end of the last set you need to accept ...”), beware of the opinions of those who are not familiar to you on Vkontakte, Facebook, Twitter, on randomly found forums.

Tip 4 // Trust yourself

When I first started training, I lived in a city where I didn't know anyone who was into bodybuilding. I was fond of sports, and I decided to take part in my first competition, a small, local one. I trained hard for many months, I was in good shape, I felt emotionally uplifted, seeing what I had achieved.

Two weeks before the competition, my friend took me aside and told me that I had no chance of winning. He wasn't a bodybuilder, but he was local and he swore I had no chance of winning because I was new to the scene and the judges were too political.

By the time he told me this, I was already an active bodybuilder. I trained a lot and hard, and the event was about to happen, so his opinion did not change anything. I went and won this competition, but if he had given me this “information stuffing” when I was just starting to train for the competition? Most likely, I would have believed him, would have quit training, and, of course, would not have won the competition.

Perception and judgment are part of bodybuilding. Unfortunately, everyone sees the world differently. In the end, you decide for yourself: how much humiliation and failure you are willing to endure, and how far you are willing to go. You may have the best mentor in the world and an amazing community, but ultimately the decision is yours.

Listen to the advice of those who know what they are talking about. But when that doesn't sound plausible, check the facts and make a decision based on how you feel.

Tip 5 // It's all about the mindset

The last tip will be the most important: it's all about your thinking. It means more than metabolism, metabolism, your genetics, whether you have a trainer, and even what gym you have access to. If you are determined, believe in yourself, and continue to act despite obstacles, you will achieve your goals.

You can bodybuild for many years. But one day - it may happen much sooner than you think - work, children or life in general can stop training. But you may continue to train hard into your 60s. Young bodybuilders are future champions, with the right mindset you can achieve what you dream of in the sport.

Leave comments below. Tell me how I can help you achieve your goals, move to the next level.

Bodybuilding, in essence, knows no gender or age restrictions. Along with adults, experienced athletes in the world, competitions are also held among young bodybuilders. They have their own specifics and rules. The International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness (IFBB) regulates the procedure for holding such tournaments.

Performance features

Junior bodybuilding competitions are, according to the standards of sports, bodybuilders between the ages of 18 and 21, those who are younger are young men. Upon reaching the age limit, the athlete is still classified as a junior or, if desired, competes in the senior category.

There is also a gradation among the juniors themselves - depending on the country of the tournament, athletes differ in weight. In Russia, bodybuilding among juniors is divided into two categories, namely up to and over 75 kg. Juniors at the same time perform in the absolute category. As you can see, there are not so many categories in bodybuilding for juniors.

In turn, bodybuilding competitions among juniors are held in such categories as "Classic Bodybuilding" and "Fitness". In both, male juniors are represented by absolute categories that do not imply restrictions on height. But fitness and bodyfitness require the classification of girls: below and above 163 cm. World Junior Championships last for 4 days

Classic bodybuilding

As a sports discipline, classical bodybuilding was formed relatively recently - in 2005. The difference between these competitions lies in the assessment of the proportionality and relative moderation of the muscle mass of the participants. Whereas other types of bodybuilding often aim to increase its volume. Juniors in classic bodybuilding perform quite often.

The key criterion for evaluating a candidate is the optimal ratio of weight and height of an athlete. It is calculated according to the formula: maximum weight = height - 100 (+ 2-10 kg depending on height). Thus, within the framework of classic bodybuilding for adults, there are three main categories:

• 170 cm (up to and including);
• 180 cm (up to and including);
• over 180 cm.

Juniors also compete in the nomination of classic bodybuilding. The categories for them are slightly different:

• 170 cm (up to and including);
• 178 cm (up to and including);
• over 178 cm.

"Pros and cons"

This direction in bodybuilding has both its supporters and opponents. Perhaps the main drawback of discipline is its strict regulations. The fact is that non-compliance with the above criteria leads to the inevitable disqualification of the athlete. There are no compromises here. Given the age of bodybuilding juniors, the question sometimes arises as to whether it is reasonable to take steroids so early.

At the same time, the very idea of ​​classical bodybuilding contradicts the use of steroids and puts the harmony of the formation of the body, its aesthetics and individuality at the forefront. The formula for calculating the optimal ratio of weight, height and muscle mass is applied even before training. The target muscles of such an athlete in this regard seem to be the most natural for him.