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Hey everybody. It's Kevin Weiss from bodyperformance.net brought to you by Rip Toned Fitness Products. And today I have a video that's going to address a couple of questions that I got, two part question where the first one was directed at having a career in powerlifting and what my career in powerlifting was like, how I got into it and what can be considered in that. And then the second part of the question had to do with kids getting into powerlifting, like at a younger age and stuff like that, and what the risks of that are. And if things need to be considered, as how old they should be getting in and stuff like that. So I'm just going to touch on both of these pretty briefly. First thing I'm going to say about the career in powerlifting. If you're considering a career in powerlifting, make some hard considerations because I have been involved in this for about 40 years and I never have considered it a career. My powerlifting training, and my powerlifting coaching, my powerlifting competing, all the way to a world championship.
It enhanced my career as a trainer perhaps, to have also been doing training as a full-time professions for over 20 years now. Those things, my national championships, my world championships, that was a credential that was used to add legitimacy to what I was doing, I suppose. But a huge amount of my clients probably couldn't have cared less that I was a powerlifter. They maybe acknowledged it, some of them probably didn't even know what it meant, but the actual having a career as a powerlifter, there's maybe a fraction of a percent of the world's powerlifters that actually have enough sponsorship and usually wealthy parents and various other things where they're getting income from, now with KZread and Facebook and Instagram. There's a few other avenues where they can get revenue, but it's incredibly limited. And I would say you're looking at a incredibly small percentage of the people that are actually making their living from it and the window of being able to do that is very small.
So that being said, I'm not taking away from anybody's dreams about wanting to be a powerlifter for a living. It's just, I'm telling you, there's very limited avenues where you can actually make money doing it and even coaching, online or in-person or whatever. If I was to rely just on powerlifting clients over the years, I would have starved to death a long time ago. So I still train powerlifters all the time, but they probably make up about 1% of my actual clientele. The people that pay my bills and allow me to do what I do for a living are not powerlifters. They're just you mostly general people. And some of them eventually end up getting an interest in powerlifting, but it's just like saying they're entering a career as a powerlifter, they're not. All these people have jobs. They have lives and powerlifting as a hobby.
So that's just touching on that really quickly. If people that want to get involved in powerlifting, now let's talk about that. And there's some discussion about that, of when, how old you can be and stuff like this, because there's that old saying where oh you're going to stunt your growth, if you're lifting weights at a young age and that goes... That's right up there with the women are going to get too muscular and guys that don't work out because they don't want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, all of these things that have essentially no basis in science, but they've been around a long time and they continue to be.
So the way I look at it is this, and there's this video on whether kids should lift weights or not. It could be two hours long. And there's many, many videos on KZread or elsewhere from people that are a lot more educated than I am as far as academically, but not necessarily more experienced. So like I said, previously in the video, I've been doing this for over 40 years and people could take me as an example and look at me and say, well look, you're like... because I'm not tall. I'm like 5'7". And well look, you might've been six feet tall if you wouldn't have lifted weights. Well, you got to look at your genetics of the people that are doing this. So my dad is six feet tall. So people will go, oh, well, you should have been... You stunted your growth by lifting weights, while my mom's 5'2", my oldest brother is 5'1" probably, and has never lifted a weight in his life.
My second oldest brother who lifted weights on and off periodically, but not at any serious level. He's about 6'1". My other brother who is a year older than me. And he lifted weights at a very high level. He's about 5'10". So I kind of fall somewhere in the middle of that at about 5'7". And I've lifted, started lifting weights when I was 12 years old and was told by many people...
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