Stronger Is Better for Heavy Kids [baby]

Stronger Is Better for Heavy Kids

Written by Daniel J. DeNoon

May 23, 2002 -- Strength training may be the best type of exercise for obese children, a Chinese study suggests.

Most exercise programs for children stress aerobic workouts. These are great -- but heavy kids tend to drop out before they get much help. This led Rita Y.T. Sung, MD, and colleagues at Chinese University of Hong Kong to come up with a different idea.

Instead of aerobic exercise, Sung's team put obese boys and girls on a strength-training regimen. During six weeks of summer vacation, these 41 youths aged 8 to 11 went to regular 75-minute training sessions. Each session included:

  • 10 minutes of warm-up,
  • 20 minutes of strength training (a maximum of 10 repetitions of near-maximum-effort work with major muscle groups),
  • 10 minutes of aerobic exercise (treadmill),
  • 10 minutes of agility training (dance),
  • Five minutes of cool-down.

All children ate a diet of no more than 1,200 calories. Compared to 41 similar children who went on the diet but skipped the training program, the strength-trained kids increased their fat-free body mass. Their cholesterol numbers got better, too. They didn't lose lots of weight -- but they clearly were getting healthier.

"Although the reduction in body mass was modest ... parents and children were not disappointed because they had been warned not to expect the rapid weight loss seen with adult programs," Sung and colleagues write in the June issue of Archives of Disease in Childhood. "The aim, in these growing children, was to prevent them getting more obese and developing related complications."

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