A 17-YEAR-OLD boy contracted a life-threatening illness from hitting the gym too hard to compete with his bodybuilder father and brother.

A TEXAS teen was reportedly diagnosed with a life-threatening illness after hitting the gym too hard.

Jared Shamburger, 17, said he first started feeling “super” sore last week after lifting weights for 90 minutes at a Houston-area gym, news station KTRK reported.

“Everything hurt,” Shamburger said.

“It hurt to the touch. It was swollen.”

The teen, who recently joined the gym, said he was trying to “go hard fast” to compete with his dad and older brother, both of whom had been into bodybuilding for years.

“I gotta catch-up to them and get as big as them,” Shamburger told the news station.

The soreness, however, didn’t subside and his mum contacted a doctor.

“The mamma bear in me kind of took over and I called the paediatrician and said, ‘I really think my son has rhabdo,’” mum Judy Shamburger said, referring to rhabdomyolysis.

Her suspicions turned out to be right. The teen was hospitalised for five days with the life-threatening condition.

Rhabdomyolysis causes muscle tissues to rapidly die and release a damaging protein into the blood, according to Medical News Today.

Some cases of rhabdomyolysis are the result of overexertion. If not treated, the condition can lead to death.

“If he hadn’t caught it, if he hadn’t told me, if we had just gone out of town about our way,” his mum said. “I can’t even imagine. And I don’t want to, about what could have happened.”