Injury Prevention in Adolescent’s Sports
Middle school and high school sports provide the foundation for teamwork, trust, and perseverance that help us achieve our goals and build strong relationships. Kids love playing sports and parents love watching them, but every sport has risks. Injuries are mentally and physically damaging to adolescents, and come with lasting consequences. As a chiropractor, most of the students I’ve treated had injuries that were entirely preventable! So whether your star athlete is going for the big scholarship to their dream school or just playing to have fun and stay in shape, encourage them to follow this advice to keep them healthy out on the field.
More than 3.5 million children under the age of 14 are treated for MSK injuries each year.
We often think about injuries as broken bones and concussions from a hard tackle in football, or a takedown in wrestling. The reality is, most injuries in young athletes are caused by overuse--not trauma! Overuse injuries are tough to catch early, as they are usually quiet, unseeming aches and pains that eventually develop into a serious problem. Overuse injuries can affect the muscles, ligaments, tendons, bones, and growth plates. With children, these tissues are growing rapidly and often unevenly—bones typically grow faster than muscles during adolescence. This places younger athletes at a higher risk of muscle, tendon, and growth plate injuries. Poor technique, improper training frequency or intensity, and returning to a sport too soon following an injury are surefire ways to ruin a season.
The most common overuse injuries involve the knee and the foot.
To prevent stress fractures and strain/sprain injuries, we recommend to students that are involved in rotating sports, year round, to rest 1 day per week and 1 month per year. Rest is one of the most crucial components of muscle recovery and hypertrophy, both of which are necessary for the growing athlete. Rest days not only help the body maintain the strength and condition to withstand stress, but they also help to prevent burnout. Psychological burnout happens when a child is either overtrained, negatively coached, or feels they have very little control over their decisions, as is the case in many star athletes who face pressure from their friends, family, and coaches. Symptoms of burnout are not obvious and could mimic a mild overuse injury: fatigue, low energy, increased pain, less achievement, etc.
The majority of child athletes report mild to moderate burnout in their sport, though only 1-2% of athletes quit their sport due to severe burnout.
One of the most common-sense ways to keep your child safe while playing their sport is to wear the proper PPE. All sports can be broken down into a few categories: contact/collision sports, limited-contact sports, and non-contact sports. The equipment for these sports will look very different, but in the case of contact sports, wearing high quality protective gear can significantly reduce risk of injury. PPE companies are required to rigorously test their gear before selling new product lines. The modern Riddell helmets have been proven to reduce the risk of a concussion in football players by over 30% when sized and worn correctly. In Junior A hockey, players that did not wear a visor or face guard were 4.7 times more likely to suffer an eye/face injury. This is the simplest way to keep your child safe… buy them the right gear. This does not mean that you have to roll your child in bubble wrap! In fact, there are lots of PPE that are not statistically effective in the slightest. Our favorite example is the prophylactive knee brace, which is designed to dissipate lateral forces to the knee. In reality, it offers little to no protection when studied in collegiate athletes.
Children are 3x more likely to get injured during a game than during practice.
For non-impact sports, protective equipment like braces and wraps can provide stimulation to an injured or overused tissue. Golfers and tennis players need an elbow brace on hand at all times to provide assistance to forearm muscles that are often strained due to highly repetitive movements. In baseball, a study from the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine found that elbow braces significantly reduced joint gapping in the elbows of pitchers.
Spinal manipulation is 40% more effective than medical care at treating lower back injuries.
The last thing you can do to reduce risk of injury or to treat an existing injury is visit your local chiropractor. Spinal manipulative therapy is clinical proven to improve nerve conduction velocity, reduce reaction time, and increase the number of myocytes recruited during muscular contraction. It is also highly effective at pain reduction, which goes hand in hand with sports injuries. Chiropractors see over 35 million people each year and deliver over a million adjustments each day. By visit a chiropractor regularly, you can save on pharmaceutical costs by 85% one study found! At our office, we employ spinal manipulation, manual therapies, functional rehabilitation, cold laser, electric stimulation, and many other modalities to assist our young athletes. If you take your child’s health and safety seriously, we would love to see you as a patient in our beautiful, state of the art clinic located off of Avery Rd in Dublin. Call or email today!