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For young athletes who specialize in a particular sport, a higher risk of injury is a serious concern. A 2015 study of 1,190 athletes aged 7 to 18 showed that sport-specific training is an independent risk factor for injury.
In another study that looked at 546 Kentucky athletes, specialized basketball, soccer and volleyball players had a 50 percent higher risk of overuse knee pain. And not only physically, early specialization is also associated with psychological burnout.
Despite all this, up to 30 percent of young athletes practice a single sport to the exclusion of others.
“While sports specialization has its well-documented downsides, young athletes continue to pursue this path,” said Neeru Jayanthi, co-director of Emory Healthcare’s youth sports medicine program. So rather than trying to dissuade young specialty athletes, Jayanthi is working with them to make the best of the situation.
“I think it’s probably naïve to just say, ‘okay, let’s take this youthful, high-level individual athlete and say, ‘now go and play another sport.’ I think you just have to embrace them and work with them,” says Jayanthi .
In an article in Sports Health magazine, Jayanthi and others wrote that young athletes who focus exclusively on one sport should be taught to recognize injuries early — for example, pain or swelling that lasts more than a week — and that athletes , coaches and sports medicine professionals should be taught to identify injuries early should monitor how much children exercise and what their neuromuscular and movement patterns are.
“How do you keep them healthy and give them the right tools to be successful?” he asks. This is what parents and coaches should focus on, and part of that is discussing the increased risk of injury for sports-specialized athletes.
How Much Should Kids Exercise?
An easy principle to follow, says Stacey Schley, physician and co-author of the article and a grantee with the Female Athlete Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, is that young athletes should exercise fewer hours per week than their age.
“So by the time they’re 12, we know that if they exercise more than 12 hours a week, they also increase their risk of an overuse injury,” says Schley.
A second key is encouraging free play, such as swimming in the summer or playing during recess. “There’s a principle called the sports training ratio, essentially the ratio of organized training in sports to free-time recreational play, and when that ratio exceeds two to one, we know there is an increased risk of overuse injuries,” says Schley.
Other sports or family activities can also be helpful, says Kristin Wingfield, an exercise medicine physician at UCSF Medical Center. Additionally, “kids shouldn’t play in a higher skill level or age group, they shouldn’t play on multiple teams at the same time.”
The right amount of training and playing time may not always be the same throughout an athlete’s career, says Jayanthi. During the adolescent growth spurt, typically around the age of 9 or 10 for girls and 11 or 12 for boys, young athletes are at greater risk of problems because injuries often occur at vulnerable sites, such as growth plates at the ends of bones and attach to tendons.
“Young athletes should train according to their developmental stage. The most intense competitive training happens when they’re past their maximum altitude speed or growth spurt,” says Jayanthi.
Why are diverse motor skills important?
Sport specialization promotes mastery of a small subset of motor and movement skills, but is generally insufficient to develop the individual as a whole athlete. Playing other sports develops a variety of movement skills that can be applied to the original sport.
If it is not possible to get a young athlete interested in another sport, the best alternative might be to introduce the athlete to another sport or at least aspects of it.
To illustrate, perhaps because he also directs Emory University’s tennis medicine program, Jayanthi uses youth tennis.
“In a tennis academy, there may be full-time or individual athletes at a high level of junior tennis players, but they may not be involved in organized basketball, football or other sports,” he says. “But they can use drills or warm-ups based on skills from other sports — they learn how to dribble or shoot (a basketball), how to move to kick a soccer ball, how to use a different movement pattern and how to plays.” Defense.”
And that’s what playing other sports is all about, he adds, being exposed to different movement patterns.
Differences before and after puberty
In 2019, to assess the differences in biomechanics between exercise specialists and multisport athletes as they matured, a group of researchers from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital selected matched subjects from a database of 1,116 female adolescent basketball, soccer and volleyball athletes .
The final group of subjects, 158 in total, consisted equally of athletes and multi-athletes. To test differences in movement skills between groups, subjects were asked to jump from a box just over a foot tall and land on a platter, which measured the landing force using a 3D motion analysis system. The athletes were examined twice before and after puberty.
The results, published in the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics, suggest that female athletes exhibited biomechanical changes before and after puberty that may increase their risk of injury compared to female multi-sport athletes. In particular, the female athletes who specialized before puberty were more likely to land in a way that put extra pressure on their knees.
Greg Myer, director of the Emory Sports Performance and Research Center and lead researcher on the study, points out that sport specialization reduces neuromuscular adaptability, which can lead to problems.
Without this adaptability, “I’m not as neuromuscularly healthy, as adaptable, or as responsive if someone hits me while I’m trying to cut or twist to absorb, tolerate, and redirect that and use it to maintain ideal movement mechanics.” .” ,” he says.
Myer emphasizes that if children and young people want to specialize early on, sports medicine professionals, coaches and parents must give them “opportunities to develop other types of movement patterns.”
For Myer, improving movement skills begins with achieving what he calls primal muscular strength through resistance training. Ideally, this starts early, before bad exercise habits develop.
Kiki Prather, a 17-year-old volleyball player from Flowery Branch, Georgia, began working for Myer in Emory as a high school freshman. Prather, who has focused exclusively on volleyball for the past six years, sees the benefits of injury prevention: “Especially on certain things like serving, I notice how I’m positioned and how I make sure I’m not overexerting myself or landing wrong.” take a jump or just stay low.”
But there is more to it than that. “The training has helped me with my jumping, I feel much more stable and have better technique when jumping and landing,” she says. “I know a lot of my friends from other schools, they don’t do that and I’m sure they don’t think of things that we’ve been made aware of.”
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