Training & Development

Why is my nine-year-old doing push-ups? Dryland, explained

Dryland for a nine-year-old doesn't look like a gym — it looks like tag, crawling, and jumping, and that's by design. What looks like play is actually the exact kind of movement a young athlete's body needs before anything resembling “training” makes sense.

August 14, 2026 · 5 min read

Idea in Brief

  • The session that looks like recess is the program working. For swimmers under about 10 or 11, good dryland is built from running, crawling, jumping, and games. That shape is deliberate.
  • The safety question has a calm answer. Mainstream pediatric guidance holds that kids can build strength safely when the work fits their age and someone qualified is watching. The documented problems cluster around the opposite: heavy loads and no supervision.
  • The program is the club’s to design. Your job is to know why it looks the way it does, so the games don’t read as wasted pool time.

You arrive early for pickup and the pool deck looks like recess. Nine-year-olds are crab-walking between cones, racing each other, laughing hard enough to echo off the ceiling. Somewhere in the middle of it your kid attempts a push-up, wobbles, and collapses into giggles. You’re paying for swim training. It’s fair to wonder what this is, and whether a child that young should be doing strength exercises at all.

What you watched has a name, dryland, and at this age it’s supposed to look exactly like that. Before roughly 10 or 11, most good programs build dryland out of general movement: running, jumping, crawling, balancing, throwing, changing direction. Games and obstacle courses, almost all bodyweight, with a coach watching how each kid moves. The goal this month is a body that has learned many kinds of movement, at the age when learning them comes easiest. Stronger comes later.

On safety, the medical mainstream is calmer than the worry. The American Academy of Pediatrics reviewed the research in a 2020 report, reaffirmed in 2024: children can gain strength safely when the work is supervised and technique comes first. A 2014 international consensus statement, endorsed across sports medicine and pediatrics, says the same. The old fear that strength work stunts growth or damages growth plates doesn’t hold up in that research. The injuries that do get documented tend to come from the reverse of what you saw on deck: kids alone with heavy weights and nobody checking form.

There’s a loose order to how this work grows up with your swimmer. Movement comes first: skipping, landing, balancing, changing direction. Then control, like holding a squat or a plank with a steady body. Strength work with real load arrives later, and power work later still. The pace is set by physical maturity more than by birthdays, which is why one thirteen-year-old is ready for a stage their classmate meets a year later. So the sixteen-year-olds may be lifting in a gym while the nine-year-olds play tag, and both are on the same path at different points.

Why does a water sport need any of this? Because racing asks a body to hold precise technique while tired, and general athleticism is much of what holds it. A kid who can control their body on land usually finds it easier to control in the water, and coaches lean on that base more each season. The broad consensus also points the same way on durability: widely athletic kids tend to handle growing training loads better. Dryland is one of the quiet inputs that Improvement is a system describes, the kind that never shows up on a results page but shows up in the season.

None of this hands you a checklist to run against your club, and that’s fine, because the design belongs to the team: which exercises, how much, when load gets added. From the stands, the signs of a healthy setup are plain. An adult is running the session and watching how kids move. The young groups do mostly bodyweight work and games. Nobody small is straining under a weight they can barely shift. If that describes your deck, what you’re seeing matches what the pediatric guidance recommends.

So when the session looks like recess again next week, let it. The laughing group on the deck is building the floor that every later stage stands on. A nine-year-old crab-walking between cones is doing the version of strength training the pediatricians recommend. The barbell can wait its turn.

Share it with your swimmer

The why lands differently at each age.

  • Under 12 (you’re driving). They don’t need the science. They need you to treat the games as real training, because they are: “Coaches use games because that’s how strong swimmers start.” What matters most at this age is that dryland never gets framed at home as the boring part before the pool.
  • 12–15 (sharing the wheel). Dryland gets more structured here, and it can start to feel like a chore. The reason steadies it: “Land work is what lets you hold your stroke at the end of a race, when your arms are heavy.” Knowing what it’s for makes the reps easier to take.
  • 16+ (they’re driving). They may be in a gym now, with a program of their own. The useful habit is theirs to build: “Ask your coach what this block is building.” Owning the why is part of owning the training.

Stay aligned with your coach

The dryland program belongs to the club and whoever designs its land work: the exercises, the amounts, the moment load gets added. Your lane is the environment around it, which mostly means not undercutting the games at home. If you’re curious, ask the coach a real question: “What’s the dryland working on at this age?” You’ll usually hear some version of the progression above, and hearing it from your own club beats any article. Anything involving pain or a worry about your own kid’s body goes to the coach first and a doctor where needed.

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