Early Specialization & Overtraining
Where do you draw the line?
Youth sports are more popular than ever before and with that popularity comes large scholarships and professional contracts. In the last 20 years the rise in year round training has lead to over training and high injury rates. Parents want the best for their young athletes and will do whatever is necessary to ensure their children will ascend to the elite levels of sport, but many people may be unintentionally ending their child's career early.
Early Specialization vs. Early Diversification
What are the benefits?
Specialization is defined by researchers as "the age or point in time in an athlete’s development when sports training and competition is restricted to and focused upon a single sport in the pursuit of elite performance." (Carpanica et al., 2011). For most athletes this age is somewhere around 12 years old. At this point a child has experimented with other sports and has usually found what they are most skilled at and what they enjoy the most.
Early specialization
Many people believe that children need to begin training for their specific sport at a younger age in order to get in the 10,000 hours that are commonly touted as the gold standard for elite level mastery. Due to athletes like Tiger Woods or the Williams sisters, it has become a far more common belief that early specialization is the only path to elite status in sport.
Early Diversification
Although early specialization has become a more common belief, there is no shortage of examples of athletes switching sports late in their careers and having massive success which leaves many to believe that natural athletic ability may have far more of an influence on skill level. This would mean that having a child play many different sports in their youth, building a robust and varied set of athletic abilities, will ultimately lead to a better outcome.
Overtraining
Diversified sport experience among the youth is often argued as a way to avoid overuse injuries which have skyrocketed in the last two decades. Baseball was one of the first sports to begin regulating their pitchers play time in an effort to lower injury rates. A study by Olsen et al. showed that pitchers that threw more than 8 months per year increased their chance of surgery by 5 fold (2006).
The Reason For The Offseason
Youth sport seasons in previous decades lasted around 4-6 months which allowed for a pre season where athletes acclimate to the training and play time as well as a post season where athletes can rest and work on their general fitness and new skills to stay in shape for the regular season. With sports seasons being phased out it has become increasingly more important to incorporate downtime for youth athletes. The American Academy of Pediatrics as well as Pitch Smart, a youth baseball organization recommend "no more than 8 months of overhead throwing a year with 2 consecutive months of rest" (Zaremski Et. al, 2019).
Bibliography
Works Cited
Capranica, L., & Millard-Stafford, M. (2011). Youth sport specialization: How to manage competition and training? 6(4), 572–579. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijspp.6.4.572
​
Zaremski, J. L., Zeppieri, G., & Tripp, B. L. (2019). Sport specialization and overuse injuries in adolescent throwing athletes: A narrative review. 54(10), 1030–1039. https://doi.org/10.4085/1062-6050-333-18