Baseball shoulder, tennis elbow, gymnast wrist, runner’s knee. These are just a few of the labels sports medicine specialists use to describe the increasing number of repetitive-use injuries they see in budding athletes.
The growing trend of children being injured in sports at a younger and younger age has doctors worried.
With National Youth Sports Safety Month falling in April, sports medicine experts would like to remind parents that fractures, sprains, and concussions are not the only traumas they need to watch out for.
Unlike acute injuries, overuse injuries can be prevented.
“Young athletes want to be the best they can be, and they believe intense training and competition can help them achieve their goals. Sometimes, however, this approach can have the opposite effect,” Dr. Frederick Azar said in a statement by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. “Frequent and repeated duplication of the same movement — whether in swimming, pitching, tumbling, jumping, or serving — can produce an overuse injury that may jeopardize a child or teenager’s sports career.”
The trend is fueled by a combination of factors, including more children specializing in one sport at a younger age, growing competitive pressures, rigorous training regimens, resuming practice before an injury has healed completely, and improper injury prevention.
Dr. Amy Valasek, a pediatric sports medicine expert at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, Md., said she sees an average of 100 children per month with sports injuries and at least half of them are caused by repetitive use.
While prevention is the best treatment, once an injury occurs, rest is critical. Convincing kids of that is tough, however, because of the pressure to forge ahead and play though the pain.
“It’s important to remember that the main reason to engage children in sports is not to turn them into professional athletes, but to condition the whole body in a healthy way and instill a sense of discipline, responsibility, and teamwork,” Valasek said in a statement. “If the current trend continues, in 30 years, we’ll have a crop of adults with serious chronic injuries that require surgery and aggressive treatment.”
The STOP Sports Injuries campaign and other experts offers these tips to parents, coaches and young athletes to help prevent injuries:
• Schedule a pre-participation physical to determine any pre-existing conditions or injuries.
• Encourage your child to properly warm up and cool down before and after an activity.
• Obtain instruction on proper training and technique.
• Develop skills that are age-appropriate and increase training gradually.
• Vary activities. Research has shown that specializing in one sport at an early age can actually be detrimental to skill development.
• Encourage your child to rest and take a break, and to speak up if he is in pain or thinks he is hurt.
KiKi Bochi, an award-winning journalist, reads hundreds of reports monthly to bring readers the latest insights on family health and child development.
