This is for you, parents, guardians, care-takers, and so forth. You’ve made it to the gym. Good job. You’ve brought a tag-along (no, not the cookies, a child) and feel satisfied that the gym is a good, safe place they can roam around and have fun. Wrong. Let me share with you a few ways kids unsupervised in gyms can go poorly:

1. They can injure themselves via weightlifting. We saw this yesterday. A kid, no more than twelve, somehow wearing weightlifting gloves (I don’t even wear them) doing curls. And he was lifting way too much weight. Which is when he compromises the proper form and uses his shoulders instead. It is so easy to injure your shoulders. Do your son or daughter a favor, and watch them if they are lifting, don’t let them build horrific injury-leading motions that can hurt them in the future. We were wary of the guardian nearby, because sometimes poor form comes from them.

2. They can distract, injure, or anger someone else. This may seem odd, but sometimes meat heads hit the gym. And they often come with a temper and seriousness to accompany their workouts. As if those workouts are the most important event occurring at the time. Obviously wrong, but many do exist. Say your kid is running around, hopping over weights and bumping into equipment. Besides messing up a roider’s reps, who could release some serious anger at your kid and, ultimately–you, but he/she could also injure someone. Say somebody is far down in their squat and the youngster bumps into them. Wham goes their knees. And wham goes your pocketbook when they sue you.

3. They can injure themselves simply moving around the gym. The gym is not a safe area. It is for people to increase their fitness, which includes heavy machinery, weights, long bars, and lots of pointy edges. Can you imagine how easy it would be for them to trip and fall face-first on an 80-pound dumbbell? Not a pretty sight.

Gym

Those are a few reasons off the top of my head. I’m not saying don’t bring your kid to the gym, I’m saying watch your kids if they’re performing exercises or doing some type of exercise. It’s great for them to be active and healthy. Just keep them close to you and under your eye. Put them in child-watch, most gyms have them nowadays. You don’t want to risk their injury or someone else’s. You don’t want to risk getting booted out of your favorite gym. Just a heads up as safety is always most important to us.