05/11/2025
When Dr. Gabrielle Lyon was just 5 years old, her dad took her on 10-mile bike rides—and physical activity became part of her everyday life. That early exposure to movement laid the foundation for her passion for strength, muscle, and now, her career as a board-certified physician and author of “The Forever Strong Playbook.”
“When you instill that kind of physicality into the cultural dynamics of the household, it changes the trajectory for children,” says Dr. Lyon. Now, she’s teaching her own kids the importance of resistance training—much earlier than when she started herself at 17 years old.
As more families bring structured fitness into their routines, experts are noticing a shift. “This generation of children is seeing their parents at the gym, and so it’s more common for a family to do that together,” says Dr. Eva Seligman of Johns Hopkins Medicine.
And even though the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) has been issuing position statements on the importance of youth resistance training since 1985, getting kids involved still feels a bit “avante-garde,” Dr. Lyon says.
“There are these outdated myths, for example, that training affects bone growth and there [are] lots of injuries,” she says.
The other component at play is that culturally, young girls aren’t encouraged to pick up, say, kettlebells from an early age, but instead to enroll in dance classes, for example.
“There is this very early mental programming that I think changes the landscape of musculature in kids,” Dr. Lyon says. “We have to be very conscious of that if we want to change the metabolic landscape.”
