Once people experience something, they know the different ways their body will respond to that stimulus, negatively or positively. However, sometimes it is better to listen to someone older and more experienced about what things one should and should not do. This will save people a lot of time and energy in anything that they do, and will help prevent many common mistakes that young people are tempted to make when they first go to the gym; mainly, teenagers around sixteen to twenty one years old. Though it may seem to many young people that simply lifting weights helps them to gain muscle, such a view neglects to take into account the science of how to gain muscle, and the three basic rules for accomplishing that: structured diet, training, and necessary recovery time. Therefore, young people should be taught in physical education classes about how best to become the athlete they want to be in order to achieve their goals.
If teenagers had the knowledge on how to gain muscle correctly, they would not struggle to do so. In order to prevent this, knowledge must be provided, and the best place to provide it is in physical education classes, preferably in high school. The Physical Education teachers must be certified to teach their class about how the body works and how students can keep their bodies healthy by combining exercise, diet, and recovery. The problem with most of the physical education classes is that the only thing students learn is how to run around a field for a determined period of time. After the students finish running, if there is still enough time before the bell rings, the teacher will just allow them to play games until the class ends. According to the United States Department of Health and Services, since 2009, less than twenty percent of adolescents participated in physical activity for at least sixty minutes daily. This means that about one in four teenagers do not engage in sixty minutes of physical activity on any day of the week. Despite the fact that a small percentage of teenagers are moderately active, they are still lacking the necessary knowledge to prevent the common struggles that young people face in the early stages of going to the gym.
Many times teenagers do not realize the importance of a structured diet to their weight lifting. “This is probably the number one mistake that all teens make when they start lifting weights” (Stewart, Alex. 1). In the article “Ignorance of youth,” Alex Stewart explains that one of the most common mistakes made by teenagers, when they first go to the gym, is a lack of a structure in their diet. One could say that in order to gain muscle the most important rule is to have a proper diet structure. By saying this, the author helps one see that without a proper structure in a diet, the results for the teenager are going to be suffering. However, lacking a diet structure is not the only struggle and mistake that teenagers face when going to the gym for the first time. In this article, the author explains twelve other mistakes that teenagers are tempted to make, and also explains the two main mistakes along with the lack of a structured diet just mentioned. In the article, "Built by Science,” Mike Roussell says that even though having a structured diet is the key rule to follow when it comes to build muscle, the other two mistakes about to be mentioned are not to be ignored since they will also affect one’s results.
Furthermore, there is a lack of structured training for teenagers. In the article, "Welcome to Mass Class," Jacob Wilson specifies that this is one other very common mistake done by teenagers and is extremely important, not as much as diet, to build muscle. Everyone has seen someone ask a teenager what he was going to train and they answered, “I have no idea, maybe some chest.” That is a perfect example of an unstructured training because one can
