If your soccer player says that they want to play basketball in the winter, letting them participate may actually reduce their risk of a lower body injury.
According to a recent study, sport specialization may increase your child’s risk of injury compared to playing multiple sports. The reason behind this is because multiple sports require different training regimens and movements during athletic activity. These differing movements work a variety of muscle groups and work to strengthen more areas of your body. Single sport athletes can find themselves overdeveloping certain muscles while ignoring others, and this discrepancy between muscle groups can leave an athlete predisposed to injury.
Develop An Athlete
At Silverman Ankle & Foot, we always say that parents and coaches should work on “developing the athlete, not an injury.” Imagine that you had 100 days to help your child train for an unknown athletic event. You’d probably work on a variety of things, like running, jumping, throwing, catching, swimming and kicking. You prepare this way because you don’t know what to expect, so you want to be ready for everything.
However, there’s another benefit of doing all these different training techniques. Each activity works different muscle groups, and they actually develop different skills. Kicking a soccer ball also develops coordination, swimming builds muscles in the arms and legs, and throwing improves hand eye coordination. This leaves the athlete more well-rounded and with stronger muscle groups throughout their body than someone who just focused on mastering one specific activity.
What’s more, specializing in one sport is associated with a higher likelihood of a lower body injury than kids who only play in one sport. Overuse is the number one cause of athlete injury, and kids who are repeatedly calling on the same muscle groups are more likely to suffer a lower body injury. Of course, this is assuming that they were to play the same amount of games. For example, a child who only plays 15 soccer games a year is less likely to be injured than a child who plays 15 soccer games, 15 baseball games and 15 basketball game a year, but an athlete who plays 40 soccer games a year is more likely to be injured than someone who plays 20 soccer games and 20 tennis matches a year.
Also, researchers noted that there is a magic number of games high school athletes should limit themselves to each year if they want to avoid an injury. Sports researchers found that athletes who played more than 60 games per year were 85 percent more likely to suffer a lower body injury than kids who didn’t reach this threshold.
So the best advice we can give to parents whose kids want to play multiple sports is to let them. It may actually reduce their risk of injury by strengthening new muscle groups. And if you have any questions about sports injuries or ankle sprains, feel free to reach out to Dr. Silverman in the text box below.
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