 For thousands of years, sports have given people an exciting pastime and taught them the value of discipline and sportsmanship—“fairness, respect for the opponent, and graciousness in winning or losing.”1 Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern-day Olympic Games, expressed it best: “The most important thing… is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.”
Somehow, though, mankind lost its focus on this ideal. Instead, the increasing commercialization of sports fuels dreams of winning college scholarships and reaching athletic stardom, pushing many youngsters toward unrealistic goals—which they pay for with their childhoods and damaged health. With an estimated 30 to 45 million youth participating in organized sports,2 more than 3.5 million young athletes seek treatment for sports-related injuries annually,3 and chiropractors in sports- and rehabilitation-oriented practices are noticing the trend.
In his Silver Spring, Maryland, practice, Steven Horwitz, DC, CCSP, CSCS, has seen an increased number of knee, wrist, elbow, shoulder and back overuse injuries among young athletes. “When I give talks at local baseball camps, 10- to 12-year-old kids tell me their elbows hurt. My patient’s 15-year-old daughter and her friends always wear ankle braces. All this is inexcusable,” he adds.
Sport Specialization
Many experts believe that part of the problem is early and intense sport-specialization. “Because of specialized sports participation, young athletes are training year-round,” says Faith Doyle, DC, DACBSP, who practices in Puyallup, Washington. The 14-year-old swimmers she works with get only a three-to-four-week break from their intense practice schedules per year, she adds.
“Specialization comes with a price,” agrees Jim Kurtz, DC, CCSP, DACRB, whose practice in Federal Way, Washington, centers around sports injuries and rehabilitation. “When I was a kid, we played a variety of sports throughout the year. It was natural cross-training—while some muscles were being worked, others had a chance to rest. Now young athletes repetitively use the same muscles and joints with no time to recover, which results in injuries such as tendonitis, muscle strains, and occasionally avulsion-type fractures.”
It’s also problematic that American youngsters immediately get into sport-specific training, rather than acquiring basic athletic skills and then specializing in a sport, says Dr. Horwitz. “Children join different leagues at the age of six or eight, getting right into soccer, basketball, baseball, instead of first learning to jump, run, start, land and so on,” he says. In addition, many children “start sports in a deconditioned state due to sitting at the computer all the time.”
Overuse Injuries
While sports participation also predisposes athletes to risk of traumatic injuries, statistics show that only 8-10% of all sports injuries come from trauma, says Philip Santiago, DC, DACBSP, CCSP, chairman of sports medicine for New York Chiropractic College, who has been in private practice for more than 25 years and serves on the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Sports Medicine Committee. “The rest is overuse.”
Overuse injuries come in four phases, he continues:
- Feeling ache and soreness after activity
- Aches and pains toward the end of activity
- Intense or frequent pain during activity, which affects performance
- Feeling pain all the time, including during rest periods
In the first two stages, athletes usually ignore the pain, writing it off as a sprain or strain and unwilling to tell the coach, afraid to lose a position or play time, he explains. By stage 3 or 4, they start looking for help, and, most often, they have to be pulled away from activity. “If we can catch them in Phase 1 or 2, it could be a matter of changes in biomechanics,” he says. |
