Meet the mini fitterati

Kieran Murphy, the marketing director of Shokk, says that the company goes to great lengths to ensure safety. “We provide qualified and specialised children’s fitness trainers at each site,” he says. “And although our gyms look like mini-versions of adult equipment, the resistance machines require children to lift only Frisbee-weight discs. The aim is to get them into the habit of working out so that they will keep it up for life.”

Certainly 12-year-old Katie Southwell, from Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, can’t get enough of the Shokk environment. She’s been a member of her local gym for four months and attends every other day. “I do 15 minutes on the running machine, five minutes on the bike, 1,000 metres on the rowing machine and some weights,” she says. “I joined because I wanted to feel fitter and didn’t really have any sport hobbies. I love it and so do a lot of my friends.”

Such enthusiasm is surely welcome news for a nation with almost one third of its five million children aged 2-11 overweight or obese. Katie Southwell says that she “feels healthier” and “would like to carry on at the adult gym when I am old enough”. But are gym workouts for her age group a step too far? Whether the prescriptive nature of gym sessions, in which physical activity is channelled into an hourly slot, is the solution to growing waistlines remains fiercely debated among experts. Some argue that the intense and repetitive exercise can be harmful, both to physical and psychological development.

Dr Craig Williams, associate director of the children’s health and exercise research centre at the University of Exeter, says that well-managed and designed children’s gyms, “that have specially trained staff who are knowledgeable about child physiology and psychology, might have a place in 21st-century living”. But, he stresses, “they should enhance, not replace, a broad spectrum of physical activity” that includes play and school sport.

Professor Margaret Talbot, chief executive of the Association for Physical Education, an organisation representing almost 4,000 PE teachers and lecturers, agrees. “The problem with gyms is that they are simply a means to an end, usually losing weight,” she says. “That type of exercise, with few goals and openings for progression, can become pretty boring.”

It may also predispose developing bodies to injury and growth problems, says Dr Eric Small, who chairs the American Academy of Paediatrics (AAP) committee on sports medicine and fitness. He says that gym classes for the under-eights are not only ineffective in warding off obesity, but can damage under-developed skeletons. “Fitness is actually an adult concept,” he says, adding that young bodies are not capable of the “level of sustained activity required to improve cardiovascular health, strength and flexibility”. In some cases the “fragility of an infant’s bones can set them up for injury” when they are forced into unnatural positions. Even for older children and teenagers, too much exercise performed under inadequate supervision can, says Dr Williams, be as damaging as too little.

Workouts can ultimately prove debilitating, triggering conditions that force youngsters to be sidelined from activity for months. Dr Joanne Welsman, a researcher in paediatric physiology at the University of Exeter, says strength training during the pre-pubertal years is particularly risky. “It is fine for children to do supervised exercises that involve moving their body weight around,” she says. “But when they lift extra weight or push against a heavier resistance than they can manage, it can cause structural harm because their bones haven’t yet matured.” Stressing young bodies, says Dr Welsman can lead to anatomical imbalance and so-called “growth diseases”.

Common among young gym enthusiasts is Osgood-Schlatter, a condition in which the growth plates at the top of the shin bone (or tibia) become inflamed when tendons attached pull hard on it during exercise. It can affect any child, but is more common among boys and usually strikes between 10 and 16. Symptoms include a tender swelling on the knee and pain during activity, and treatment can involve setting the knees in plaster for six weeks. Often the medical advice is to do no sport for up to a year.

Another problem, chrondomalacia patellae, is caused by an imbalance in muscle strength on either side of the knee-cap, often through inappropriate exercise. Teenage girls are more likely to suffer because of their wider pelvises, which pull the knee-cap over to one side, causing a searing pain. It requires children to wear heavy strapping until muscles are re-educated.

Beyond the physical dangers, experts cite the sterile, almost self-worshipping environment of gyms as possibly having a negative influence on a child’s psyche. “It would be a pity if, by going to gymnasia, where the prevailing culture is body image, children were to become more concerned with how they look than how they feel,” Professor Talbot says. “Other forms of physical activity, such as dance and sport, focus on performance and what the body can do, not purely how it looks, which is far healthier psychologically.” Several American studies have suggested that teenage gym members do have poorer body image than their peers. It seems that for the overweight in particular, rather than helping them to adopt healthier habits and shed pounds, gyms can often damage their already fragile self-image. They become vulnerable and lack confidence.

For some, this simply compounds the doubts about whether youth gyms are really necessary. Thirty years ago children didn’t need gyms to stay slim, so why now? Talbot believes paranoid parenting is partly responsible both for the decline in activity levels among British children and the growth of the youth gym. There is an argument that children become members of gyms as a result of parental anxiety about fatness and safety, or because their parents feel less guilty about spending little time with their offspring if they hire a “fitness babysitter”.

“I look back at my own, very active childhood and it revolved around ‘playing out’,” she says. “But very few children do that these days. It’s not as if the risks are any greater than 40 years ago. Yet parents are so wary.” The gym offers a safe haven under the watchful eyes of experts. But, Professor Talbot says, children who attend gyms “don’t always develop a love of exercise”.

Despite such concerns, the youth fitness market is expected to boom here as it has in America. Recent statistics from the US-based International Health, Racquets and Sportsclub Association found that the under-15s represented the second-fastest growing healthclub demographic after the over-55s and gym membership for the 6-11 age group has soared to 1.8 million in five years.

Now the target for the American market has got younger still. Infants as young as ten months are being taken to clubs such as those in the Little Gym and My Gym chains by parents determined to instill exercise habits as early in life as possible. Baby gym bunnies can climb on balance beams and perform back-flips with mummy holding tight. One celebrity baby endorsement and the craziest fitness fad could yet be here.

HOW TO GET YOUR KIDS MOVING

1. Get down on the floor and play with your children. Cedric Bryant, chief exercise physiologist for the American Council on Exercise, says: “The key is just to get your children to move. Just make sure it’s fun.”

2. Don’t rush them into doing organised activities. In its guidelines, the American Academy of Paediatrics recommends only 15 minutes of “structured activity” for under-sixes. Instead, they should be playing and exploring.

3. Turn off the TV. The AAP recommends no TV for children under 2 — and no more than two hours of total screen-time (TV, video games or computers) for older children.

4. Be a good role model. Children whose parents exercise are more likely to do so themselves.

5. Don’t rely on gadgets or classes. Louise Sutton, lecturer in health and exercise science at Leeds Metropolitan University, says: “Put on some music, get them to dance. Just be inventive.”