Need help with youth Diet/Recovery for my son

Your kid hasn’t hit puberty yet. That’s a massive rush of testosterone he hasn’t experienced yet. I wouldn’t worry about tracking his calories and all that. I would focus on making sure he’s eating well and often as needed. Once he hits puberty, he should put on mass. Then you can better gauge what he needs to eat. You gotta do what you think is best for your kid, but I think you should wait until he hits puberty and see how he develops.

Weight lifting is fine for kids, assuming that he is being taught how to lift properly. Obviously I can’t tell you that without being there. Just let him eat when he’s hungry. Which will be all the time. Protein, carbs, fats and vegetables. Feed him quality whole foods and he will grow. I would save the protein shakes for post puberty if he needs more calories, but even then, he should be hungry enough to just want to eat. Keep in mind, I’m not a doctor. All I’m offering is what I would do.

Dude - he's 12. Keep it simple. Do not give him supplements or worry about how much he's eating. If he's not complaining about being hungry then just let it be. If you're going to be on him about his weight at 12, he may end up having a bad relationship with his body & food as he grows up.

If you want him to get some easy additional calories, throw a couple of PB&J's into the mix.

ok for diet, Yeti suggested JP's book swole and that is 100% spot on, but i would say start even simplier than that(but you need to read the book)


start with the following

Breakfast- many times this is skipped or its a grab a honey bun and leave. Stop this. He needs to be eating a big protein packed breakfast every day and needs to start this habit now. Great athletes in general do not skip breakfast. Get him 3-6 eggs cooked the way he wants, 2-4 oz of some kind of meat and some form of carb like oatmeal or bread. later on if he isnt gaining, simply adding egg yolks only or butter/heavy cream mashed into the eggs is an easy way to add calories.


Lunch- you can fix or eat in cafateria. I am not sure how it works now a days or at your school but in general have him focus on eating the meat first, then the carbs like rice or whatever second and tell him to make sure he is finishing those. An easy way to add quality calories here is sending him with a RTD protein shake to drink with the meal. easy way to add calories here is butter in/on the meats and protein shakes being drank with the meal itself.

Dinner- Make sure you have him focusing on eating plenty of meats and then some carbs like rice, pasta etc. Meats should focus on red meats as much as possible.

Pre bed- have him drink a protein shake or eat some eggs or quality peanut butter etc. As mentioned, JP has a good recipe in his swole book. You can easily add calories here with the EVOO method.



Jim Wendler and Zach Evan-ish have talked about what they have kids do is start learning to cook. They keep it simple adn tell the kids to learn to cook scrambled eggs, ground beef, hamburger patties, and how to cook rice. They have them pre make and freeze hamburger patties and even freeze cooked ones and to make big batches of rice every week. This keeps it simple and cheap. They tell the kids that once you learn to do that, there is no excuse to not be able to grab 1-2 frozen cooked hamburger patties and nuke them and and throw them into a tupaware with a cup or two of rice for lunch or as a snack. Let them season or use ketchup or use things like hot/soy worcestershire sauce etc to make it edibile.

Essentially teach them to cook for themselves and learn to eat for performance. Later in HS they tell the kids to learn to use the grill so they can start with chicken quarters/thighs etc and to buy the rotisserie chickens from sams/costco and break them apart in portions in zip lock bags for quick grab and go proteins.

many people on here are going to tell you not to worry etc. bullshite. I wish my dad would have worried more about this kind of stuff when i was in middle and early hs days. I couldnt gain weight to save my life and eventualyl resorted to eatinga jar of Peanut butter with syrup every night on top of my weight gainer shake. It sucked donkey balls. Biggest problem though was skipping breakfast etc.


As he gets older and gets a phone he can start tracking using the myfitnesspal app as more of a general idea what he is eating and as a general reminder if he needs to eat more.

You are doing the right thing, but we dont want to make the kid resent you as a parent and we do not want to cause complexes. In general late elementary/early middle school is the perfect time to start teaching them nutrition and cooking skills that will last a lifetime. We want to make him mindful of things so he wants to do it, not force it on him. He can never eat too much meat and eggs, especially quality red meat and quality free range eggs. As a last resort, you can always start him drinking large quantities of milk, but that should be an absolute last resort.

But just remember athletes need an off season. and manytimes what an athlete needs is much less skill training and a much bigger focus on base building in the form of weightlifting and mobility work. Many times I have seen 140lbs freshman focus on nothing but skill development, epsecially in baseball. Their parents will pay for batting lessons like crazy and then little johnny is a junior and is still 140lbs and wonders why he has no power after years of batting lessons. Well if little johnny would have lifted 3 times a week for those 3 years and cut back to 1 batting lesson a week and had a real off season. 185lbs junior with slightly worse skill development will out perform the 140lbs junior with the better skills 99% of the time. Biggest skill you can give a young athlete is hypertrophy and strength.

At 12 he is capable of starting to put on muscle as he has hair on his balls by that time, but we want to pay very close attention to making sure we focus on joint health and mobility first, if you remember that....well you will be fine and way firther along than almost everyone else if you start lifting twice a week consistently and start good eating habits now.

Man its all I can do to get him to eat 1 egg in the am. This morning he had 1 scrambled egg with cheese and cream in them, 2 pieces of bacon, and apples with peanut butter. He eats like a bird

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Man its all I can do to get him to eat 1 egg in the am.

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Eating is how you get big. Fat or muscular. You still gotta eat a surplus.

Efferding talks about this in the vertical diet. Start by just adding calories to every meal. Then add a meal. Start slow. He can't eat until he's sick at first.

In eighth grade I could cleanly curl more than I can now. But I can deadlift double what I could then.

Screw the pretty muscles. They don't mean shite

77 said enough well that I’d don’t have much to add.

As a parent of 4 (two of which are solid athletes), I can relate. Have you considered limiting it to two sports? We did this at 12 because we were certain it wasn’t sustainable into high school (partly because we have 4).

This helped give us an actual off-season to focus on strength and injury prevention.

I've got 2 that played college ball. One Baseball one football. BOTH Div 2 Both were small undersized until the summer when they were 15. Both grew 4 or 5 inches and gained 20 pounds of muscle. They ate 4 PB&J sandwiches a day. Give them time they will be fine.