Junior golf has changed. The bar for competitive play keeps moving, kids are swinging faster and younger than they used to, and parents are being told from every direction that their kid needs to be in the gym. But what does that even mean?

Some of that advice is good. A lot of it is not. And the stakes are higher with juniors than with adults, because you are working on a body that is still being built.

Here is what we tell parents, in the order they usually ask.

“Is Lifting Weights Safe for My Kid?”

Yes. This is one of the more settled questions in the field, and the answer has been the same for a long time.

Supervised, appropriately programmed resistance training is safe for young athletes. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Strength and Conditioning Association and the International Olympic Committee have all published positions saying so. The old idea that lifting stunts growth has no evidence behind it. It never did.

What the research does consistently show is the opposite concern. Youth athletes who do not have a strength and stability base get hurt more often, not less.

The risk is not that your kid trains. The risk is that they compete at high output on a body that was never prepared for it. They also practice and play year round.

Young athlete owning the bottom of a squat. The load is light. The position is the point

The word doing the work in all of this is supervised. A well coached 13 year old learning to squat properly is one of the safer things they will do that week. A 13 year old copying something off a phone in a garage is a different situation entirely. To add to this, “golf specific training” is catchy and visibly pleasing, however it is mediocre at best in regards to the effect it has for an athlete.

The Problem We See Most Often

If we could show parents one thing, it would be this.

We regularly test junior golfers who have high clubhead speed and low strength. Sometimes remarkably high speed. They have spent their time in speed programs and on launch monitors, chasing the number that gets attention, and they have gotten very good at producing it. This is a performance advantage, no doubt about it.

The problem is that speed has to be created, sped up, slowed down and stopped. The faster the club moves, the more force the body has to absorb bringing it back under control. Every one of those swings sends load back through the wrists, the lower back, the lead hip. A body with the strength to handle that manages it. A body without that strength passes it somewhere it should not go.

We have seen, in studies, upwards of 6.5 to 8 plus times bodyweight in lumbar compression at L4 and L5 during the golf swing just after impact. Imagine doing that thousands of times to a spine that has very little stability or strength.

When we see that profile, it is not a question of whether something will break down. It is a question of when and of what.

There is one more piece to this. A junior only has so much time and so much capacity to adapt. Both pyramids below are the same size, because the total is fixed. The only question is where it goes. Every hour poured into chasing speed is an hour that did not go into the base that has to hold that speed up.

We wrote about that relationship in more detail in the strength post, because it applies to adults too. It is just more urgent in juniors.

Junior golfer performing a TRX Horizontal Pull Up. Nothing heavy, just controlled and technically proficient

Growth Spurts Change Everything, Temporarily

This one catches families off guard.

During a rapid growth phase, bones lengthen faster than the muscles and tendons attached to them adapt. For a stretch of months, a kid who was coordinated and mobile can become stiff, awkward and noticeably less controlled. Their swing may fall apart. Their scores may go backward.

Parents often read this as a coaching problem or a motivation problem. It is usually neither. It is a body that changed size faster than it could recalibrate.

It is also the window where growth related injuries cluster, because the growth plates are the weak link during that period. The bones are growing quickly and the tendon and muscle groups are trying to catch up.

The practical implication is simple. During a growth spurt you adjust. You do not push harder into it. And you need to be measuring something, because otherwise you cannot tell a growth phase from a genuine problem.

“Should My Kid Play Other Sports?”

Yes, for as long as it is realistic.

Early single sport specialization is associated with higher injury rates and higher burnout, and it does not produce better outcomes the way people assume it does. Plenty of elite golfers played multiple sports well into their teens.

Golf is a one direction sport. A junior who only plays golf is asking a growing body to adapt in one pattern, thousands of repetitions a year, for years on end. Other sports are the simplest way to balance that out, and they build movement skill that golf by itself will never ask for.

When multiple sports genuinely are not an option, then training has to intentionally do the job those sports would have done. That is doable. It just has to be deliberate rather than assumed.

What We Actually Do With a Junior

We start the same way we start with everyone, which is by measuring.

We build a functional profile: power, strength, stability, mobility and left to right symmetry, each scored against the field. For a junior that does two things at once. It shows us where they are, and it gives us a baseline to compare against as they grow.

That second part matters more than parents expect. When you have last year’s numbers, you can tell the difference between “she is in a growth phase and her control dipped” and “something is actually wrong here.” Without a baseline, everybody is guessing, and guessing about a kid’s body is not a great plan.

Another female junior golfer. 2-Arm Supported Single Leg Hinge. Learning to own positions before ever adding speed to them

From there the priorities are usually straightforward. Build a real strength base. Keep and use range of motion through growth. Develop control before adding output. Train speed, but train it on top of something.

Questions Worth Asking Anyone Who Trains Your Junior

Whether or not that person is us, these are fair questions, and a good coach will have answers.

What did you measure, and what were the numbers? If nobody tested anything, the program was designed for a generic kid, not yours.

How does the plan change during a growth spurt? If the answer is that it does not, that is a real gap.

What is the strength base before we chase speed? There should be a threshold, and someone should be able to state it.

How are you tracking this over time? Junior development is a multi year project. It needs a record, not a memory.

The Short Version

Training is good for junior golfers, and the safety worry parents arrive with is mostly pointed at the wrong thing. Lifting under supervision is not the risk. Chasing speed on an unprepared body is.

Measure first, build the base, respect the growth phases, and keep a record so you can tell what is actually happening. That is most of it.

If you want to see exactly what we measure and why, the full breakdown is here:

• The Functional Profile, the whole picture in one chart
• Strength, and why speed built on nothing is a countdown
• Power, where clubhead speed actually comes from
• Every Spoke Has Its Own Chart, the full testing series