BURLINGTON — With fall sports season approaching, parents have been tackling me with lots of questions about whether their young athlete could injure themselves from too much practicing of their desired sport resulting in what we call an overuse injury.
What Is an Overuse Injury?
An overuse injury is one that causes damage to a bone, muscle, ligament, or tendon. It comes from repetitive stress in these areas, preventing them from healing.
Overuse injuries commonly involve the elbows, shoulders, knees, and heels. They may initially be experienced as pain, stiffness, soreness, or weakness in an affected area after physical activity.
When those symptoms and signs begin to restrict performance of that sport and persist even at rest, it can mean a fairly serious level of injury. It can also lead to emotional burnout for someone practicing and playing the sport so much.
These injuries are so common because growing bones are less resilient to being stressed. This means it is best to prevent an overuse injury from happening before one occurs. How can you do this?
Best Practices
• All young athletes should have a preparticipation physical exam before they begin training for a sport — ideally several weeks before the start of the season to make sure no special exercises are needed to reduce the risk of overuse.
• When practicing, proper warm-up and cool down exercises should be used.
• Focusing on one sport for an entire year should not occur before late adolescence to reduce the risk of overuse in children and younger teens.
• Practices and games should be limited during childhood and adolescence to five days a week with at least one day off per week from organized activity to recover physically.
• A nice rule of thumb is not to train more hours per week than a child or teen’s age.
• If your athlete is experiencing increasing pain in a body part they are using repeatedly in a sport, they need to stop playing that sport and see their health care professional or a sports medicine specialist to make sure a stress fracture has not occurred as a complication of overuse.
• Physical therapy, anti-inflammatory medications, and a gradual return to play supervised by a medical professional can help reduce the severity and duration of an overuse injury.
Hopefully, tips like these will be used and even overused when it comes to helping your child not experience overuse injuries and their complications.