Name: Exercise Scientist Critiques the 300LB 15-Year-Old Strongman
Uploaded: 2026-03-21T21:33:06.000Z
Duration: 19 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

He weighs 300 pounds and already specializes in strongman 470 pounds at 14 years old.

Hey, folks, Dr. Mike here for RP Strength.

I'm good at some stuff and some stuff I'm not any good at, but whatever.

Professor of exercise science, bodybuilding competitor, jiu jitsu, grappler, stuff I have going on ain't nothing compared to today's focus.

And that's a Mr. Bubba Pritchett, son of Mr. Jerry Pritchett.

Jerry Pritchett is a legendary strongman competitor who I've seen in real life from afar as a single safe with these people at the Arnold.

I didn't really understand how someone could occupy that much visual space all at the same time.

I think Jerry Pritchett's in the 65 range and weighs like 400 pounds.

No, I was actually 5ft tall even when I was 14.

He weighs 300 pounds and already specializes in strongman.

Let's learn things about him and we're gonna have a pretty informative episode for you guys about all the things involving the collision of lifting weights and children.

Meet Bubba, aka the strongest teenager in the world.

At only 14, he set numerous records in strongman competitions.

Yeah, I mean, I just wonder what his school age children, friends think of this.

There's like beef at the movie theater and the kids from the other high school is there and someone gets pushed and they're like, hey, they have an adult giant strongman on their team.

It's not something you could eat other 14 year olds if you're his size.

I guess to me sociologically, it must be a little interesting to be that unique, Scott, you know what I mean?

Like when I was 14, I was like below average and everything.

But you can't be going raking records at 14 without it affecting your swag a little bit.

Like, and like he's walking through middle school and he's bigger than all the teachers.

You're like middle school eating middle school children.

The teacher's like, hey, hey, Bubba, get your homework done.

Well, actually, I'll do your homework for you.

So makes sense from an elite strongman perspective.

All right, so at nine years old, Bubba weighed a paltry, dare I say near anorexic, 250 pounds.

Oh, IJK man, it looks like he weighs about 252.

So yeah, he probably weighed about 200 pounds then, huh?

So he's deadlifting 250 pounds at nine years old.

I'm gonna see the lift and I'm gonna comment on it.

10 years old, he's now deadlifting 275 pounds.

305 pounds at 11 years old, Scott, look at his face and Overall body at 11.

That's an adult lifting at that point for sure.

Let's talk about a few things with children and lifting weights very young.

You may have heard of the fact that if you lift when you're a kid and you lift too young, that your still unfused and active growth plates will fuse and close and you won't grow as tall as you could because of the high forces.

Every time they analyze any amount of evidence with young lifters, which are actually all around the world in sport of weightlifting and now the sport of strongman, they find zero detectable relationship between youth lifting onset and height relative to predictive factors from parents or compared to peers.

So when you're saying something and there's not really any evidence for it, and

almost all the evidence goes against it, you have a problem, but the problem deepens still mechanistically.

You say high forces cause growth plates to close.

The problem is, is that jumping up and down, like to have any kid have them jump as high as they can and land a few times, you'll notice that humans invented a game called basketball where they do only that those forces that go into the vertebrae of the spine of the long bones of the body are multiples higher than the Maximum forces imposed into the bones compared to when you lift weights straight up.

Landing forces from jumping are higher than almost anything you can do in the gym.

So why aren't people who jump up and down a lot like basketball players much shorter than the people they compared with that aren't?

Because it turns out, in order to screw up your growth plates and prevent yourself from getting taller, you generally need a gnarly injury like a broken bone or some crazy stuff like that.

And then there is a potential that the growth plate gets screwed up and you're in a bad way and you don't get to be as tall as other folks.

And maybe you need some surgery to correct that.

So the reality is, the idea that children can't lift weights without affecting their height is seemingly more and more likely every year that we do research on it to be just something someone made up.

Which, by the way, the world in your own head and my own head is filled with quote unquote facts that are really notions of just somebody made the shit up.

And we are going along with it with no end in sight.

That's really the deal on height and lifting weights.

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Exercise Scientist Critiques the 300LB 15-Year-Old Strongman

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