You shouldn’t be a passenger along for the ride in your life’s journey. You can decide what you want your life to look like and make it a reality.
“The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.” – Marc Andreesen
Marc Andreesen knows a thing or two about changing the world (he almost literally invented the internet as we know it).
Find what’s important to you and hunt it down.
How to be less injured as an adolescent athlete. Do we know anything?
Title: Factors Associated with Sports Injuries in Adolescents Who Play Team Sports at a Non-elite Level: A Scoping Review. Authors: David A Sainsbury BSc (Physio) M Manip Ther, Jenny Downs BAppSc (Physio) MSc PhD, Kevin Netto DipEng (Mech) BSc (Hons), PhD, Leanda J McKenna BAppSc (Physio) Master Sports Physio PhD
What is it?
A scoping review trying to find the information gaps regarding what causes injuries in adolescent athletes.
Why does it matter?
Playing a sport is positively associated with physical and mental health across childhood.
Getting injured takes that away from kids.
The more we know about what pulls them out of their sport, the more we can do to keep them in it.
What did they find?
There were over 12,000 identified studies and 377 included studies (imagine the amount of coffee consumed in the process).
The strongest potential risk factors in prospective studies were:
- high training/practice load (pitch count in baseball, jump count in volleyball, etc.)
- playing in competition
- and previous injury.
What was the process?
The inclusion criteria was:
- Team sport athletes
- Non-elite level.
- Elite was defined as competing at the state, regional, or national level, playing at the highest level of their competition against intercity, interstate, or international teams, or being selected for a youth academy or program linked to a professional sporting club.
- 10-18 years old
- Assessed potential risk factors for msk injury.
Exclusion criteria:
- Elite level
- Participants had specific health conditions
- Outcomes were concussion or head/spinal cord injuries.
- Not published in English peer-reviewed journal
- Case studies, abstracts, opinions, letters, guidelines, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses
My thoughts.
The potential risk factors identified in this study match up with my anecdotal experience.
There are only so many times a kid can swing a bat or hit a volleyball before something gives out.
Can we raise that threshold with high quality training? I sure believe so. But, there’s still a ceiling.
The presence of “previous injury” as a risk factor is unsurprising for anyone who made it through PT school, but I think it remains undervalued.
We need more emphasis on being present in the frontlines to prevent the first injury from happening.
How can you use it?
- This study wasn’t designed to draw conclusions, but I’d still feel very confident advocating for controlling practice loads.
- Don’t wait for the first injury to happen. Try to stay in front of things to the best of your ability.