🥇 Every athlete should specialize.

A deep dive on specialization

Every athlete should specialize if they want to reach their highest potential.

“…. what did this guy just say?”

I know, I know. It’s heresy. Blasphemous. Specialization is criminal. It’s destroying athletes.

Just hear me out.

If you’re strapped for time, here’s the TL;DR version:

Specializing too early increases your athlete’s risk of injury, decreases their physical movement library, increases the odds of burnout, and decreases the odds that they align with their unique gifts and interests.
Diversifying too late decreases your athlete’s opportunity to improve their athleticism and decreases their odds of developing a polished skillset.
At some point, focusing on one particular sport is going to have a higher return on investment than playing multiple. This point is different for everyone.

Specialization flavors

No standard definition of sport specialization exists, so I’m referring to the process of an athlete prioritizing and focusing on one singular, main sport.

Specialization can come in a number of flavors, each with its own set of implications.

Timing

Early sport specialization involves an athlete specializing at the age of 12 or younger.
Late sport specialization involves an athlete specializing at the age of 16 or older.
Though no one ever talks about it, I guess we can refer to specializing between 12 and 15 as mid sport specialization?

Degree (these aren’t segmented elsewhere, so the degree of specialization is a category I’ve created.)

1st degree specialization is when an athlete clearly states their favorite sport, but does not prioritize it to the detriment of other sports.
2nd degree specialization involves an athlete having a “main” sport that is clearly prioritized over the other sport(s).
- This could be a 16 year old football player (main sport) who also plays baseball in the spring. He might go to all of the baseball games and practices, but he’s going to train intensely to get ready for college football camps in the summer, even if it results in excessive soreness and worsened performance on the diamond.
- This could also be a 13 year old who plays softball and basketball. Her main sport is softball, so she plays that year round, even during basketball season.
3rd degree specialization is when an athlete ceases all other competitive sports and is solely focused on one single sport.

These two variables (time and degree) can be paired together to further specify the specialization (e.g. 2nd degree late mid specialization).

Why people hate specialization…

Research shows that athletes who specialize have higher injury rates.
Playing multiple sports provides physical development benefits.
Playing multiple sports provides psychological development benefits.
Most elite professional athletes played multiple sports in high school, so reverse engineering the GOATs tells us that playing multiple sports helped them reach that level.

Specialization and injury

In academia, both “specialization” and “injury” are poorly defined. It’s hard to study them individually. If you put them together, it’s a nightmare.

Digging into the research shows that it’s a bit more murky and less clear than some people will cite. This is where logical thinking can play an important role in making better decisions.

With specialization, we’re mainly concerned about overuse injuries. If you do the same movement over and over again, without variety, for a prolonged period of time, then you’re more likely to have an overuse injury. That’s common sense.

If this repetitive stress is applied to developing, untrained, weak, pre- or early-pubescent athletes, then common sense will also tell us that injuries are even more likely to occur.

Early specialization of anything over 1st degree is going to increase injury risk. Playing any sport year round is going to increase injury risk, especially at younger ages.

Specialization and physical development

Playing a bunch of different sports as you’re growing up is called sampling.

Different sports requires us to move in different ways and accomplish different tasks (have you ever kicked something in a baseball game or caught a ball in a soccer game?).

Sampling sports with different movement patterns exposes your athlete to a more rich proprioceptive environment.

Think of their proprioceptive environment as akin to the training data for artificial intelligence. If an AI model is just trained on James Patterson novels, it’s capabilities are going to be limited. If it’s trained on every book ever written, it’s going to be able to make logical leaps in new situations and articulate insights clearly.

If your athlete only plays softball her entire life, then her ability to understand how her body operates is going to be limited. If she samples softball, soccer, basketball, gymnastics, and swimming at various times throughout her childhood and early adolescence, she’s going have a wide range of movement skills and have a much higher athletic ceiling when she does decide to double down on softball.

Specializing and focusing on one sport does allow for greater fine tuning of specific skills. Steph Curry is a great shooter because he shoots 500 shots per day. Repetition does matter, but is often best layered on after achieving a diverse movement skillset.

Specialization and psychological development

Burnout is real. Doing the same exact thing day after day, month after month, and year after year is mentally exhausting.

Chick-fil-a makes great food. Their drive thru lanes resemble NYC traffic jams for a reason; people love it. In college, our team would get it for us every time we traveled and for post-practice meals on a regular basis.

It was great, until it wasn’t. I got exhausted with eating mildly soggy Chick-fil-a sandwiches every week for 4 years.

It took me 6 years after graduating to step into a Chick-fil-a store without feeling nauseous.

If an athlete plays the same sport year round (or 8-9 months out of the year) from the age of 6 until 18, they’re going to get sick of it. I don’t care how much they tell you they love it when they’re 12, it catches up with them.

Furthermore, the sampling period allows them to find the path that most aligns with their unique interests and physical gifts. The more aligned they are, the more confidence they’ll have, and the more they’ll enjoy their athletic career. The more someone enjoys what they do, the more likely they are to achieve greatness in that field.

Elite athletes and multiple sports

I saw a tweet/X-post that summed this point up well.

“Multi-sport participation is like most everything in training—it’s helpful until it’s not & that point is different for everyone.

For rare elite athletes, their 20s.

For good athletes, some point in HS.

Some 12 yr olds have to go all-in on 1 sport just to have a sport to play.”
-Nathan Huffstutter (@CoachsVision)

We’re all playing by different rules. Patrick Mahomes played three sports at a high level because he is athletically superior to most everyone else on the planet, not vice versa.

Some athletes go to big schools where 50+ girls try out for a 12 person middle school volleyball team. Athletes here might have to specialize just because they aren’t good enough at multiple sports to play multiple sports.

Some athletes go to small schools where they’re begging a 9th girl to come out for high school softball, just so they have enough to field a team. Athletes here might play 4 sports throughout high school, because they want to just maximize their enjoyment of high school sports (with no particular ambitions of becoming great at one singular sport).

Focus

Specializing too early is a problem if you want your athlete to reach their highest potential. But, so is diversifying too late.

At some point, focusing on one particular sport is going to have a higher return on investment than playing multiple.

If you play 3-4 sports year round, you will not have an off-season to dedicate to improving your athletic engine and honing your craft.

There is a reason we don’t see athletes play multiple sports at the professional level (and if we ever do, it’s so rare that they make a documentary about it).

A sample pathway

Everyone’s path will be different, but I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t lay out an ideal starting point.

Age 0-3:

Start gymnastics. Practice throwing, kicking, swinging, running, climbing, swimming, and jumping. Encourage as much unstructured free play as possible.

Age 3-9:

Stay in gymnastics.
Sign up for every sport under the sun that your kid will agree to play.
- Make sure one of those sports involves swinging an object, one involves throwing an object, one involves kicking an object, and one involves a lot of running and change of direction.
Encourage as much unstructured free play as possible.

Age 9-12:

Gymnastics participation is optional.
Choose the 3-4 sports that they enjoy the most and play those.
If they show interest, they can begin to have semi-structured training.
Still, encourage as much unstructured free play as possible.

Age 13-15:

Choose the 2-3 sports they enjoy the most and play those. A “main sport” may be identified at this time.
Begin more structured training.

Age 16-18:

Choose the 1-2 sports they enjoy the most. Prioritize a “main sport.”
Train intensely and purposefully.

Age 18+:

Focus on one sport and pursue it with great intensity and focus.

Takeaways and my two cents

Specialization is going to happen for everyone who wants to be great at a sport, it just happens at different times.
Demonizing kids for not playing 3 sports through high school is unfair and unhelpful.
Making kids choose a “main sport” at 11 years old is also unfair and unhelpful.
Specializing too early increases your athlete’s risk of injury, decreases their physical movement library, increases the odds of burnout, and decreases the odds that they align with their unique gifts and interests.
Diversifying too late decreases your opportunity to improve your athleticism and decreases your odds of developing a polished skillset.
At some point, focusing on one particular sport is going to have a higher return on investment than playing multiple. This point is different for everyone.

A quick thought on the right answer

There is no solution, only tradeoffs.

We spend so much time looking for the right answer. It doesn’t exist.

There are tradeoffs for every decision we make. Choose the tradeoffs that most align with your life goals and values.

Find peace knowing you can’t solve everything all of the time.

More from me…

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Thanks so much for your help in spreading the word about athlete development!

Be >,

Zach

Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS