Originally posted by Jayclark
That kid was on Ripleys Beleive it or Not tv show. The doctors told his dad to quit letting the kid to wait lift because your not really supposed to weight lift til about 16 years old. This is because before then you have small gaps between your bones and lifting weights will/can bend the bone slowly then when it grows it will grow wrong. It cause a lot of pain.
They are called growth plates. If you look at a picture of a femur you will see at the top of it (at the knee) some rough looking bone area. In kids this is much smoother and is where the bone grows in length.
All the strain on this growth plate, with heavy lifting, probably does do some damage to it. If you break a bone and separate the growth plate frome the lower part of the bone you can risk perminant stunting of that limb.
