@PABaseball posted:I've seen too many 7th and 8th graders lifting hard with trainers at the gym who never ended up getting past 5'8 but they're shredded up. There may not be hard evidence, but every single middle schooler I've seen on a weight training program ended up being the jacked short guy. Every single one of them. I'm not taking pushups, situps, conditioning type workouts. I'm talking bench, squat, lunges, deadlift.
Sure it's anecdotal, but it's not nothing.
Of course there are limits to what is healthy at a young age, but weightlifting does not stunt your growth. You're projecting conclusions onto reality that don't make sense. A tall, very skinny 8th grader is not yet biologically able to get huge in the gym. A shorter, stockier kid is more biologically able to bulk up at a younger age, and probably feels the need to do so to compensate for being shorter. Neither of those facts means that weightlifting stunted the shorter kid's growth, or that the 6 foot 3 kid would have been 5 foot 9 if he lifted weights. It's just an outdated myth.