Should young athletes be getting many injuries?
A few articles have appeared lately describing how many young athletes are now getting injured because of too much effort being exerted. According to the sports medicine doctors, the increase is attributed to overuse injuries and overtraining which is a condition of chronic fatigue
According to the experts, there is added pressure for kids to keep participating even though they’re hurt or have a slight problem. Doctors see youngsters on a daily basis who feel they need to work through pain for themselves and for their parents.
That many athletes are now getting injured from overtraining is nothing new. It has been known for well over 30 years. One reason for this appears to be that many coaches and parents read articles about high-level athletes who started at a very early age playing only one sport and achieved stardom, as for example, Tiger Woods in golf.
As a result, they believe that the more training they can do beginning with the very earliest ages the better they will become. This idea, that the youngster must start at a very early age and train exclusively in one sport probably started with the false information that the media perpetuated when the east Germans and Russians were so dominant in sport.
At that time it was believed that the Eastern Bloc athletes were great because they were literally taken out of the crib and then molded into great athletes. As a result, American coaches tried to duplicate what they believed these countries did to develop great athletes.
It could not, however, been further from the truth. In East Germany and the USSR athletes did not specialize in one sport until they were teenagers (with a few exceptions in sports such as gymnastics and figure skating). Instead of looking closely at how these countries trained, coaches and parents took to heart this misleading propaganda. As a result they pushed the youngsters into playing only one sport.
Thus it is not surprising to read about the many injuries that youngsters are getting. The only difference today is that is that there are many more injuries than there have been in previous years, but it is nothing new. It is well established that playing only one sport year round leads to injury.
The main reason for this is that the athlete has no time to train to develop the physical and technical abilities needed to prevent injury and to improve performance. By participating in a sound scientifically-based training program as we have developed can improve their performance faster and more effectively than only playing.
If we would look more at the scientific bases of training youngsters and spend more time training and educating coaches (and to a good extent parents) we would see much fewer injuries. However, it does not look as though this will happen any time soon.
It appears we keep relying on getting more and more athletes to participate in a particular sport on a year round basis in the hope that several great athletes will rise to the top as cream does in natural milk. All the other athletes serve as fodder for the few who make it to the top. This is a tremendous waste of our youth.
For more information on this topic see Build a Better Athlete and Secrets of Russian Sports Fitness and Training.