Telford, UK - Most 10-year-olds don’t wake up to lift weights at 5 AM before their school day’s start, but Aeryn-Ejjina Atkinson isn’t like most 10-year-olds.

The young English girl started weight training three years ago when she was just seven. What started with modified deadlifts to ensure her safety has now expanded into all forms of weight lifting, including bench pressing, squats, and kettlebell exercises, to name a few.

Her dad, Craig Atkinson, supervises her workouts every morning, and given her young age, he helps with modifications for different weight lifting sets that she’s interested in to ensure her safety, starting with deadlifts.

Discussing how it all began, Aeryn told LADBible: "It was difficult to start because Daddy wouldn’t let me but we found a safe way to do it. It made me feel really good inside."

While a few of Aeryn’s long-term goals are to make it into the CrossFit Games and The Olympics when she’s older, she has other dreams that might play out in the very near futur – like opening up her very own weight-lifting gym.

Since COVID-19 shut much of the world down, Aeryn had a lot more time on her hands and she's not only using it to train, but also build to out some genuine business plans around the gym she wants to create.

The project came to be after her parents gave her a quarantine project of creating a business plan, knowing that she someday wanted to own a gym.

Her parents ended up showing the plan she crafted to several personal trainers, who gave raving reviews of Aeryn’s plan. This encouragement stoked the young girl’s motivation to reach out to more gyms and pick their brains to see if any would let her learn more about the ins and outs about running a gym.

While Aeryn continues to train and pitch ideas to different gyms, her parents are by her side, lovingly supporting her through every step of the way.