Last updated on November 13, 2022
Question:
Hey minister
What is the average age or time to grow sideburns? I am starting to see strands of long hair going down my face. I am 15 going 16. Did I start puberty a little too early? Because I heard that sideburns grow at the end of tanner stage 4. Did I start puberty at 9?
Answer:
Sideburns typically begin to appear during stage 4, though for some men they don’t appear until stage 5. Any individual feature can change at various times, coming earlier for some males and later for other males. Thus, trying to guess your start of puberty from one feature is highly inaccurate.
But let’s just assume you are a year into stage 4. That would mean you started puberty roughly five years earlier, so you would have started, by this guess, around age 11 or just before. The average age for the start of puberty is age 11, so you are at the average or just slightly before the average.
Question:
Ok, but did my facial hair start growing early because of weightlifting and exercise since exercising increases testosterone and growth?
Answer:
Exercising will cause a temporary increase in testosterone for about 15 minutes to an hour. However, these short spikes will not cause any noticeable speeding up of your development.
As I mentioned before, if you look at any single sequence of change, such as the development of facial hair, there is a notable order to the change. However, when the changes start and the speed at which those changes take place will vary from one boy to another. Those differences are mostly due to your genetics and your overall health.