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Youth & adolescent training
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In one pass With someone watching, the movement done right and the load raised gradually, strength training is safe for children and teenagers aged 5–18, and it reliably makes them stronger.
Educational content, not medical advice — consult a clinician.
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Chapter 1
Does lifting stunt growth?
With someone watching, the movement done right and the load raised gradually, strength training is safe for children and teenagers aged 5–18, and it reliably makes them stronger.
The idea that lifting stunts a child's growth did not come from nowhere. In the 1970s–80s there were a few case reports of growth-plate injuries in adolescents, mostly when nobody was supervising, technique was poor, and the young lifter was straining at a maximal weight. Those stories were passed along, and slowly widened into "any kind of resistance training is dangerous."
The current evidence paints a different picture. Behringer 2010 pooled 42 controlled trials in children and adolescents and found clear strength gains after resistance training. The Faigenbaum 2009 position statement from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and the 2020 clinical report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), written by Stricker and colleagues, both come down on the side of recommending it, not discouraging it.
As for height: twin studies put about 80–90% of adult height down to genes, with nutrition, hormones, sleep and general health sharing the rest. In the training trials Malina 2006 reviewed, growth in height and weight was not affected. Those trials lasted only months, so final adult height was never tracked directly, but none of them showed supervised training making children shorter.
The idea that lifting stunts a child's growth did not come from nowhere. In the 1970s–80s there were a few case reports of growth-plate injuries in adolescents, mostly when nobody was supervising, technique was poor, and the young lifter was straining at a maximal weight. Those stories were passed along, and slowly widened into "any kind of resistance training is dangerous."
The current evidence paints a different picture. Behringer 2010 pooled 42 controlled trials in children and adolescents and found clear strength gains after resistance training. The Faigenbaum 2009 position statement from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) and the 2020 clinical report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), written by Stricker and colleagues, both come down on the side of recommending it, not discouraging it.
As for height: twin studies put about 80–90% of adult height down to genes, with nutrition, hormones, sleep and general health sharing the rest. In the training trials Malina 2006 reviewed, growth in height and weight was not affected. Those trials lasted only months, so final adult height was never tracked directly, but none of them showed supervised training making children shorter.
Background · Why the old story spread so far
Case reports travel further than because they come with a picture: one child, one deadlift, one X-ray. But a case report has no denominator and no control group. It tells you that something went wrong; it does not tell you how many of the children who trained ever got hurt.Put the denominator back and the numbers look very different. Hamill 1994 pooled questionnaires from British schools with data from other studies, mostly on school-age adolescents, and in the survey every group was coached by a qualified physical-education teacher. Per 100 hours of training, ordinary machine and barbell weight training produced about 0.0035 injuries, and Olympic weightlifting about 0.0017 — both far below soccer, basketball, rugby and gymnastics in the same compilation. This is a descriptive statistical summary, not a randomized trial, but its direction matches the position statements that came later.
So the precise version is not "lifting is dangerous" but "unsupervised maximal lifts are dangerous." The difference comes down to three things — dose, supervision and technique — not the movement itself.
Mechanism · Where a child actually gets stronger
Children really do get stronger from strength training — just not always where you would expect.Producing force starts with a command from the brain. One motor nerve plus the small bundle of muscle fibers it controls is called a motor unit. How hard you can push depends on how many motor units the brain wakes at once, how rapidly it fires them, and how well several muscles work together. Before puberty, the hormones that thicken muscle fibers are not yet running high, so the progress training brings at this stage happens mainly along that command line: motor units that used to sit idle get recruited, nerve impulses fire more densely, and when you push on purpose, the muscle on the opposite side that would otherwise hold you back (the antagonist) learns to let go in time.
That explains a puzzle many parents notice: a child goes from one pull-up to ten in a row, yet the arms barely look thicker. Strength grows in the nerves first, and in size later.
Follow that one step further and it becomes clear why this stage should lock in technique rather than rush the load. You are writing the default movement patterns for a control system that is still being wired: where the knees travel in a squat, how the shoulder blades draw back on a pull, how the trunk braces when you drive. Once a pattern is written, the body keeps calling on it. When the hormones rise and muscle really starts to thicken, it is that already-written pattern that takes the heavier load. If what got written was a compensation, every extra kilogram afterward only practices that compensation more firmly.
That is why the NSCA position statement and the AAP clinical report set Youth & adolescent training goals around technique and movement quality, not the number on the bar. This is not caution for its own sake. It is the layer where the body pays out at this age.
Chapter 2
Growth plates and the real risk
At each end of a long bone sits a layer of cartilage that has not yet turned into bone. It is called the growth plate (epiphyseal plate), and it is how bones get longer: the layer keeps making new cartilage, which hardens into real bone on the side facing the shaft, so the bone is pushed outward a little at a time. That makes it a live construction site, and by nature it is weaker than the finished, mature bone next to it.
What a construction site fears is being sheared sideways or struck. What it does not fear is pressure added a little at a time along the long axis of the bone — which is exactly what proper resistance training gives it. The situations where things really go wrong are fairly fixed: an unsupervised maximal lift, or an uncontrolled landing or twist, where force cuts across that cartilage layer in an instant.
So the safety line for adolescents is not "cannot train." It is "do not treat a maximal single lift as daily training, and do not let peer rivalry choose the weight." Nor does the growth plate shut overnight: it is gradually taken over by bone from both sides, closing at around 14–15 in girls and around 16–18 in boys.
What a construction site fears is being sheared sideways or struck. What it does not fear is pressure added a little at a time along the long axis of the bone — which is exactly what proper resistance training gives it. The situations where things really go wrong are fairly fixed: an unsupervised maximal lift, or an uncontrolled landing or twist, where force cuts across that cartilage layer in an instant.
So the safety line for adolescents is not "cannot train." It is "do not treat a maximal single lift as daily training, and do not let peer rivalry choose the weight." Nor does the growth plate shut overnight: it is gradually taken over by bone from both sides, closing at around 14–15 in girls and around 16–18 in boys.
Mechanism · The four zones of the growth plate
Under a microscope, the growth plate is not a uniform slab of cartilage. From the end of the bone toward the shaft it is organized into work zones, each handing off to the next.The outermost is the reserve zone, where cartilage cells sit quietly — the seed bank of the site. Further in is the proliferative zone. Here the seed cells start dividing, and the new cells do not pile up at random: they stack like a roll of coins into columns along the long axis of the bone. Bones grow longer rather than wider because of the direction of those columns.
Further in again is the hypertrophic zone. The cells in the columns stop dividing and instead swell to several times their size, while sending signals to their surroundings. This is the most fragile band on the whole site: once the cells balloon, the load-bearing matrix between them is squeezed thin, so the layer is essentially rows of large bubbles separated by thin walls. Innermost is the zone of calcification and ossification. Blood vessels push in from the shaft side, bringing clean-up cells and bone-building cells; they clear away the swollen cartilage cells and lay down real bone along the cartilage scaffold left behind. However far the columns have stacked outward is how far the bone has been pushed.
Only now does "afraid of sideways force, not of force along the bone" have an anatomical reason. The columnar structure can cope with pressure along the columns: force is passed down the scaffold layer by layer, and because bone is living tissue, repeated but tolerable pressure makes it stronger — that is the route by which resistance training helps adolescents build . Sideways shear is another matter. The thin matrix of the hypertrophic zone has almost no fibers holding the two halves together across it, so when shear force is large enough, this is the first plane in the whole bone to slip.
Two things that are both called loading therefore end very differently. A squat that a coach watches and that adds a little each week is predictable load along the columns. An uncontrolled landing, a twist that gets yanked, or a maximal weight ground out through gritted teeth is sudden shear in a direction nobody controls. The danger was never the weight itself. It was the direction and the loss of control.
Red flag · When to stop and see a doctor
Three signals deserve to be taken seriously. First, pain in or around a joint or bone that lasts more than 2 weeks after training, especially just below the knee, at the wrist or at the elbow — common growth-plate sites. Second, any severe, sudden joint pain with obvious swelling or loss of movement. Third, pain that gets worse right after exercise and does not ease with rest. If any one of these appears, stop training and see a pediatrician or a sports-medicine doctor for a physical examination, with imaging if needed.The cautious tone is deliberate: once a growth-plate injury has happened, slow handling can leave long-term consequences. What is described here are the early signals parents tend to miss; what the problem actually is, and how long to stop, is for a doctor to judge after an examination.
Numbers · Where the line sits, and how big the risk is
First, draw the line clearly. What really threatens a growth plate is not an ordinary set of 8–12 reps at a moderate load. It is a single maximal effort: an untrained adolescent, with nobody coaching, attempting a weight clearly beyond what they can control. Physiologically these are not events of the same size. The first is a set they can finish steadily, each rep on much the same path, with force traveling honestly along the columns. The second is a shock the body has never met, and it can only be completed with compensations such as a collapsing trunk, a rounded back or knees caving inward — and a compensation, at heart, is bending force along the bone into force across it.That is why AAP 2020 writes the prescription as progress by ability rather than orders by age: under a qualified coach, a young person moves forward one step only when the technique for that step is in place. A common arrangement is bodyweight training from 5–9, external load added gradually from age 10, and something close to adult training volume only once technique is solid. These are signposts set by ability, not a timetable that opens on a birthday. One-repetition-maximum () testing — measuring the most weight you can lift once — can be used now and then to assess progress, but should not become a daily training tool. Every time, it pushes someone to the edge of their control, and the edge is exactly where compensations appear.
Injury data support this line. In the school data Hamill 1994 compiled, with qualified teachers coaching, weight training produced about 0.0035 injuries per 100 hours and Olympic weightlifting about 0.0017 — far below most youth team ball sports. Put another way, hour for hour, a game of half-court basketball carries a higher injury risk than a coach-supervised dumbbell row. That comparison is often misread as "basketball is harmful." What it really shows is something else: risk comes from situations that are fast, unpredictable in direction, and involve contact with other bodies — landing a rebound on someone else's shoe, getting bumped in the middle of a cut. Those are the classic moments that produce sideways shear, and machine and bodyweight training remove all three.
Mechanism · Why the growth-spurt years need a closer eye
Once you know how this construction site works, a few things can be reasoned out from its structure.First, when height is rising fastest, the site is busiest — and softest. The proliferative zone is dividing hard, the hypertrophic zone is stacked with swollen cells, and the whole cartilage plate is thicker than usual. Thicker means the weak plane is wider, so the same uncontrolled landing is a different event during the two growth-spurt years than after the plate has closed. That is why what this stage most needs to practice is not load but how to land and how to brake a change of direction — training aimed straight at shear.
Second, sudden clumsiness in these years is not laziness. The bone lengthens first, and the muscles and tendons attached at both ends are passively stretched, so the levers change, the relative lengths tighten, and the body map the brain has used for years no longer quite fits. Movements that used to be right with eyes closed go wrong for no obvious reason — and a movement that goes wrong is exactly the step that bends load along the bone into load across it. Dropping the weight and going back to clean the movement at this point is working with physiology, not going backward.
Third, after closure, the first structure to fail changes. Once bone has taken over the growth plate from both sides and the line in the middle disappears, the ends of the bone become continuous mature bone, and the old weakest plane is gone. The same fall has to find another way out for the force. So adults and children whose growth plates are still open are not most vulnerable in the same place during the same movement. This also explains why adult training experience cannot simply be copied onto children: not because children are more delicate, but because they carry a layer adults no longer have.
These three points are reasoned from anatomy to explain why training is arranged this way; they are not conclusions each tested in a trial.
Chapter 3
Training by growth stage
In the two years around a child's fastest growth, the body does not respond to the same training in the same way. That fastest-growing window has its own name: peak height velocity (PHV). It falls at about 11–12 in girls and about 13–14 in boys, give or take 2 years. The training framework built around it is called long-term athletic development (LTAD, Lloyd 2014).
The reason for the difference is concrete. Before PHV, the hormones that thicken muscle fibers are not yet running high, so training progress happens mainly in the nervous system. At this stage what pays most is variety and control: running and jumping, climbing, pushing and pulling, resisting rotation, balance, changing direction. After PHV the hormonal environment changes, the same training converts more readily into visible muscle cross-section, and systematic resistance training moves onto the main menu.
So a training plan should follow developmental stage, not birthdays.
The reason for the difference is concrete. Before PHV, the hormones that thicken muscle fibers are not yet running high, so training progress happens mainly in the nervous system. At this stage what pays most is variety and control: running and jumping, climbing, pushing and pulling, resisting rotation, balance, changing direction. After PHV the hormonal environment changes, the same training converts more readily into visible muscle cross-section, and systematic resistance training moves onto the main menu.
So a training plan should follow developmental stage, not birthdays.
Mechanism · Where training pays off before and after PHV
Before PHV, the body's return on training lands mainly in the nervous system. Thickening a muscle fiber's cross-section needs growth signals held high for a sustained time, and before puberty that signal set runs in low gear. So after the same stretch of training, what a child gains is more motor units that can be called on, denser nerve firing, and an opposing muscle that relaxes sooner — real strength, with almost no change in size. That is not failed training; the return has simply been paid into a different account.In the two years around PHV, the body is doing something demanding: the skeleton is lengthening at the fastest rate of a lifetime. Muscles and tendons do not grow along on their own; they are passively stretched by the bones at both ends, so for a while they feel shorter and tighter. The limbs lengthen as well, and so the lever arm each muscle works through changes. The body map the brain has used for years is suddenly off, and coordination dips for a while. The right response at this stage is to lower the load and recalibrate the movement, not to add volume and push through.
After PHV, the growth signals rise, training converts more readily into muscle cross-section, and the skeleton's adaptation to load comes due in the same window. This is where systematic resistance training pays best.
Know the limits of this picture: it is a simplification that helps understanding, not a switch anyone has measured. In the 42 trials Behringer 2010 pooled, the ability to gain strength rose gradually with age and maturity, with no sudden jump at puberty; the authors took this to mean the rise is unlikely to be a simple result of pubertal hormone changes. And those trials measured strength, not muscle size.
Put these together and it is clear why LTAD insists that developmental stage outranks calendar age. The same plan given to one child before PHV and one after it returns mainly skill and neural progress to the first and more muscle to the second. Hand it to the wrong child — heavy loads for someone who has not reached PHV — and they gain little muscle while using up the time that should have gone into writing the movement pattern cleanly. That is what stage first means in practice: not holding back out of fear of injury, but recognizing that at this stage the body's payoff is somewhere else.
In practice · How to tell whether a child is near PHV
Parents do not need precise measurements, but a few signals help: a clear speed-up in height (6–9 cm in a year is a common amount during PHV), shoe sizes going up again and again, and a short-term drop in coordination (the skeleton is growing faster than the nervous system's control). When these signals appear, the focus of training can shift gradually from mainly skills to skills plus strength. There is no need to rush a switch of plan on a particular birthday.More important is not to schedule by the age of peers. Two 13-year-old boys may sit on opposite sides of PHV, and the training that suits them is completely different. LTAD returns to this point again and again: biological age comes before calendar age.
In practice · Planning training by growth stage
A rough age ladder can be written like this. Ages 5–9: mostly bodyweight and play, building a broad base of movement skills. Ages 10–12: start using light machines and dumbbells, technique first and load second. Ages 13–15 (most children pass PHV in this band): begin systematic resistance training; a rough split coaches often use is 80% bodyweight and machines and 20% free weights. Ages 16–18: approach an adult template, with measured loads and planned progressive overload, though one-repetition-maximum () tests — the most you can lift once — should still be rare and supervised. That split is a coaching rule of thumb, not a figure measured in a trial.These ages are signposts, not gates. The stage-first argument lands here. A child who has not reached PHV should still be cleaning up movement, even if their age puts them in a later row, because at this point their body pays out mainly in the nervous system. An early developer who is already past PHV is not being reckless by starting systematic resistance training sooner, because their growth signals are already up. The judgment rests on how fast the child is growing now and how much of the movement they can control — not on the date on an ID card.
Why do the middle bands keep more than half the work on bodyweight and machines? Because both lock the path for you — a machine has a rail, bodyweight has your own skeleton — so the movement is less likely to suddenly go crooked when tired, and less likely to bend force along the bone into force across it. The value of free weights is that they do not lock the path, so you have to stabilize yourself. That is exactly why they come later and in a smaller share: when you cannot stabilize, the cost lands on a cartilage plate that has not closed yet.
The move between bands is not a switch on a birthday either. It happens one item at a time: add the new movement pattern first, add external load only once it is fluent, and talk about the pace of adding volume only once the load is steady. The moment any step starts to go crooked, drop back a step instead of trying to grind through it with extra sets.
Chapter 4
Supplement claims and how to start
What youth training really needs to watch for is not the barbell but the ring of supplement marketing around it, sold on the word youth.
Why is this the age at which supplements are least worth the money? Because the body is already in one of its strongest growth-signal periods: the hormones that drive gains in height and muscle are rising together, bones are lengthening, muscles are thickening, and the whole body is a building site at full tilt. Reasoning from that, the small extra push a supplement can add sits on top of a signal that is already loud, so there is little room for it to show. Meanwhile, eating enough total energy and protein, sleeping enough and learning to move well each directly decide how much of this window gets used. The US Recommended Dietary Allowance () for protein is 0.95 g per kg of body weight per day at ages 4–13 and 0.85 g at 14–18, which ordinary meals usually cover.
So the order is clear: first get eating, sleeping and training solid, then come back to the question of supplements. Do it the other way round and the money buys peace of mind, while the window is what you give up.
Why is this the age at which supplements are least worth the money? Because the body is already in one of its strongest growth-signal periods: the hormones that drive gains in height and muscle are rising together, bones are lengthening, muscles are thickening, and the whole body is a building site at full tilt. Reasoning from that, the small extra push a supplement can add sits on top of a signal that is already loud, so there is little room for it to show. Meanwhile, eating enough total energy and protein, sleeping enough and learning to move well each directly decide how much of this window gets used. The US Recommended Dietary Allowance () for protein is 0.95 g per kg of body weight per day at ages 4–13 and 0.85 g at 14–18, which ordinary meals usually cover.
So the order is clear: first get eating, sleeping and training solid, then come back to the question of supplements. Do it the other way round and the money buys peace of mind, while the window is what you give up.
Evidence · What common teen supplements are worth
A teen edition of protein powder is a marketing story, not a nutritional need. Separate supplementation may be needed only with picky eating, a strictly vegan diet, severe calorie restriction or competitive-level high-volume training, and even then food comes first. One point is worth adding: once protein powder, eggs, milk and soy foods are broken down in the small intestine, the same set of amino acids enters the blood. Powder does not open an extra absorption route. What it buys is convenience, not a better raw material.Creatine is more complicated. The evidence in adults aged 18 and over is solid; research in adolescents is thinner, but the safety data that exist have not flagged a special risk. The 2017 position stand of the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) considers short- and long-term creatine use safe and well tolerated in healthy people and a range of patient groups from infants to older adults. It does not rule out use in adolescents, but diet and training basics come first, and only then the question of a supplement.
Branched-chain amino acids () have almost no independent evidence of clinical benefit in adolescents; they look more marketing-driven than evidence-driven.
The pitch that puberty plus hard training boosts testosterone inflates a brief, tiny hormonal wobble into a slogan. Its real significance is far smaller than the muscle, bone-density, metabolic and mental-health gains of training itself. Take the sentence apart and it becomes clearer: the hormone swing after one session is measured in hours, while changes in muscle cross-section and bone are measured in months and years. Using the first to explain the second is like using one high tide to explain the shape of a coastline — the timescales simply do not match. By that reasoning, what really drives the changes in a body at this age is months of training stimulus plus the wide-open signal set of puberty itself, not the little extra in the blood after a single session.
In practice · Four steps to get started
The decision path can stay simple. Any child aged 8 or over who wants to start systematic resistance training can follow four steps:(a) Find a qualified coach (a certified strength and conditioning specialist, CSCS; a registered sports-medicine physician; or a national-level strength-and-conditioning credential).
(b) Start from bodyweight and basic skills, and build 6 movement patterns: squat, push, pull, hip hinge, loaded carry and resisting rotation.
(c) Once technique is reliable, add external load gradually, increasing it month by month rather than week by week.
(d) Do not compete with peers on one-repetition maximum (, the most you can lift once). Treat training as a compounding project that runs for years, even more than a decade.
Why step (b) uses these patterns deserves a word. They are not a list of exercise names but the basic ways a loaded body can be asked to take force: lower your center of mass and stand it back up, push something away, pull something in, fold the hip and open it again, walk while carrying a load, and hold steady against a force that wants to twist you. Almost every movement in daily life and sport is a combination of these. Clean these up first and every later specialty is stacked on a stable base. Add load on a crooked base, and every extra kilogram makes the crooked pattern harder to change.
The monthly, not weekly rule in step (c) is not caution for its own sake either. The nervous system learns a new movement much faster than tendons, ligaments and bone adapt to a new load. You feel I can lift this now first, while the scaffold that has to carry that strength has not yet caught up. Add weight faster than connective tissue can follow, and strength arrives before the scaffold. By this mechanism, that gap is where much of the I can't quite say where it hurts in youth training comes from. Adding load monthly is waiting for the scaffold.
In practice · If you remember one thing
If you remember only one version: supervised resistance training is safe and beneficial for adolescents, and the main pediatric and strength-and-conditioning bodies recommend it — but the word supervised carries almost all of the risk management. Technique first, load second, comparing with peers last. If pain lasts more than two weeks after training, a joint becomes suddenly and severely painful with swelling or lost movement, or pain worsens after exercise and does not ease with rest, do not hesitate: stop training and see a pediatrician or a sports-medicine doctor. Leave supplements until diet and training are genuinely established.References · 8
- Behringer, M., Vom Heede, A., Yue, Z., & Mester, J. (2010). Effects of resistance training in children and adolescents: a meta-analysis. Pediatrics, 126(5), e1199-e1210. Meta-analysis of resistance training in children and adolescents: overall strength effect size 1.12 (0.9-1.3); maturity moderated the effect, and longer duration and more frequent training helped. The ability to gain strength rises with age and maturity, with no noticeable boost at puberty. The abstract reports no injury analysis (abstract, PMID 20974785). 10.1542/peds.2010-0445
- Faigenbaum, A. D., Kraemer, W. J., Blimkie, C. J. R., Jeffreys, I., Micheli, L. J., Nitka, M., & Rowland, T. W. (2009). Youth resistance training: updated position statement paper from the National Strength and Conditioning Association. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 23(5 Suppl), S60-S79. 10.1519/JSC.0b013e31819df407
- Stricker, P. R., Faigenbaum, A. D., McCambridge, T. M., & Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness. (2020). Resistance training for children and adolescents. Pediatrics, 145(6), e20201011. AAP clinical report endorsing supervised, technique-first resistance training across pediatric age groups. 10.1542/peds.2020-1011
- Malina, R. M. (2006). Weight training in youth — growth, maturation, and safety: an evidence-based review. Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, 16(6), 478-487. Review of 22 experimental training studies in pre- and early-pubertal youth, mostly 8- and 12-week programmes: strength rose and was lost with detraining; the programmes did not influence growth in height and weight; only 10 studies monitored injuries (3 reported). Supervised programmes with low instructor-to-participant ratios were relatively safe. These are short trials, not long-term follow-up of stature or growth plates (abstract, PMID 17119361). 10.1097/01.jsm.0000248843.31874.be
- Hamill, B. P. (1994). Relative safety of weightlifting and weight training. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 8(1), 53-57. Reports resistance-training injury incidence far below that of rugby, soccer, basketball, and gymnastics in youth cohorts. journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/abstract/1994/02000/relative_safety_of_weightlifting_and_weight.8.aspx
- Lloyd, R. S., Oliver, J. L., Faigenbaum, A. D., Howard, R., De Ste Croix, M. B. A., Williams, C. A., et al. (2014). Long-term athletic development — part 1: a pathway for all youth. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 29(5), 1439-1450. Defines the LTAD framework anchored on peak height velocity and stage-appropriate training. 10.1519/JSC.0000000000000756
- Institute of Medicine. (2005). Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids. National Academies Press. nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/10490/dietary-reference-intakes-for-energy-carbohydrate-fiber-fat-fatty-acids-cholesterol-protein-and-amino-acids
- Kreider, R. B., et al. (2017). International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: safety and efficacy of creatine supplementation in exercise, sport, and medicine. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 14, 18. Position stand: short- and long-term creatine supplementation, up to 30 g/day for 5 years, is safe and well tolerated in healthy individuals and in a number of patient populations from infants to the elderly; the stand adds that significant health benefits may come from ensuring a habitual low-dose creatine intake (e.g., 3 g/day) throughout the lifespan (abstract, PMID 28615996). 10.1186/s12970-017-0173-z