UW researchers recommend that children take at least four months a year off from their primary sport to avoid overuse injuries.
If your kids compete in the same sport for more than eight months of the year, David Bell has some advice: Make them take a break.
“Sport specialization is a hot topic in sports medicine, yet there is a severe lack of empirical data that exists about the topic,” says Bell, an assistant professor in the UW’s Department of Kinesiology’s Athletic Training Program and director of the Wisconsin Injury in Sport Laboratory.
So he and his research colleagues decided to do something about it.
The result is a groundbreaking study recently published online by the American Journal of Sports Medicine that has particular relevance for highly specialized athletes in the Madison area who train in one sport for more than eight months out of the year. Bell’s research asserts they are more likely than other athletes to experience overuse knee and hip injuries.
He suggests that kids take four months off from their primary sport to participate in other athletic activities. And Bell recommends against kids playing on multiple teams in the same sport at the same time. Additionally, he adds, it’s critical to properly warm up and cool down, while adhering to injury prevention guidelines listed at StopSportsInjuries.org, a website developed by the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine.
The UW study, “Prevalence of Sport Specialization in High School Athletics,” involved surveying 302 student-athletes at two Dane County high schools during the 2014-15 school year.
Bell and his team found that athletes from the smaller school (with an enrollment of about 600) were less likely to specialize in a sport than those attending the larger school (with an enrollment of more than 2,000).
“We definitely expected those results,” Bell says, citing the fact that smaller schools need more multisport athletes to fill out rosters. “It was not surprising, but we are the first people to show that school size influences specialization rates.”
Athletes were chosen based on their participation in soccer, basketball, volleyball and tennis — sports that have high rates of lower-extremity injuries and are commonly played 12 months a year.
Student-athletes at the schools, which Bell does not have permission to name publicly, were surveyed by researchers about their sports specialization and injury history. The student-athletes then were classified into low-, moderate- or high-specialization groups. Of those who completed the survey, 34.8% were classified as low specialization, 28.8% as moderate and 36.4% as high.
Bell and his team have expanded their study to even smaller schools in rural south-central Wisconsin this academic year, and they plan to survey at least 2,000 kids ages 12 and up at several youth sports tournaments this summer.
Bell hesitates to extrapolate from the local results and make sweeping generalizations beyond this region of the state, adding that a national study is required to draw larger conclusions. He also recommends that greater efforts be made to raise public awareness about the dangers of sports specialization and overuse injuries.
For now, the key takeaway from the UW research is that training and competing in the same sport for more than eight months of the year — to the exclusion of other sports — is not healthy for young athletes and could lead to long-term-injuries.
“At some point, it’s okay for a kid to specialize,” Bell says. “But we don’t yet know when that is.”
