Health and life stages · Teenagers
Your teenager wants to lift weights. That is good news.
Resistance training is safe and good for young people. What carries the risk is maximal loading and picking one sport too early — so those are the two things the app takes away, and nothing else.
The rule
Technique before load. No maxing out.
Tell the app an age under 16 — it already asked — and three things change on their own. Nobody has to know to tick anything.
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Nothing maximal.
No one-rep maxes, no max testing, no Olympic lifting. A teenager finding out what they can lift once is the single most common way this goes wrong, and the app will not take them there.
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A wide base, not a specialty.
Movements across everything rather than drilling the one thing their sport needs. Early specialisation is a risk factor, not a head start.
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Form is the work.
Load goes up only after the movement looks right — and the camera is watching it, drawing the measured angle on their body and naming what it sees. It is the part a parent cannot stand over.
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Everything else stays.
They get a real programme, not a watered-down one. Strength work is in. The phases are the same. This is the training an adult gets, with the two risky parts removed.
For the parent
You can see that they are training. You cannot read their diary.
A 13-to-17-year-old can send you a read-only link. It opens a page that shows five things and nothing else:
- Their first nameNot their account, not their login.
- Which phase and weekWhere they are in the programme.
- Days trainedIn the last 7 and the last 28.
- The last day they trainedSo a quiet fortnight is visible.
- Whether training is on holdWaiting on a doctor or clinician. This is the one that matters most and the one a parent is actually responsible for.
What it never shows: a photo, a camera frame, a weight, a measurement, a pain entry, a food log, or a message. Their evaluation answers are theirs. Whether they are training, and whether it is safe for them to be training, is yours. We think that is the right line, and we drew it in the code rather than in a settings screen — the server checks every field against that list, so a modified app cannot widen it.
The code is eight characters rather than the six we use elsewhere, because of whose it is. Your teenager can stop it at any time and it is deleted.
Ages, plainly
Thirteen and over.
VeraForma is for people aged 13 and over. Under 13 the evaluation stops and says so. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13, and if we find that we have, we delete it.
Between 13 and 18, it should be used with a parent or guardian’s permission.
This is coaching, not medicine. If something hurts and nobody has looked at it, that is a GP appointment before it is a workout — and if a clinician has given instructions, log them and the app follows them. The screen and the programme are free.
