- Most college athletes specialized in one sport as a child
- The only way for my child to be "good enough" is for him/her to focus specifically on one sport early in life
- Children need to play their sport year-round to avoid getting out of shape
- Kids who spend their time learning one sport as a child are more likely to stay active through their lives
- The only way to develop skills in a sport is to adopt that sport early and spend time training to be better in that specific sport
- The only way to love a sport is to learn to specialize early and focus on getting better in that sport
Just to be clear, those points listed above are all MYTHS! Alright, for starters, did you know that you absolutely can NOT early specialize boys. Girls mature faster than boys and will do better with early specialization. If you do this to boys, you can destroy them. With any young athlete that gets forced to specialize, there are three major problems that can arise:
- Injuries due to overuse which may need surgery
- Burnout and low motivation
- Higher inactivity lifestyle as an adult
We talked in the last post about kids needing a good foundation of fundamental skills like running, jumping, skipping, and crawling and object control skills like throwing, kicking, dribbling, and rolling. These skills may not be able to develop if a kid is only exposed to certain movement patterns dictated by single sport demands. There are sports that do better with early specialization which include gymnastics, diving, and ice skating. With these sports it's better to focus on that sport and become an athlete with more diverse skills later. With sports like golf, baseball, and basketball you need to develop as an athlete first before focusing on sports specific skills only.
To help balance the early specialization faults and decrease the chances of the problems listed above, here's what you can do:
- Make sure to take off at least 1 full day during the week from all organized sports activity
- Make sure 1 sporting activity is not done more than 5 days in a week
- Take time off from a sport- don't train year-round. Take 2 - 3 months off and change up the activity or get involved in a strength and conditioning program
The myths listed above came directly out of a great article that can be read in detail here
References:
FMS 2014 Summit talk on Movement Screening for Juniors by Dr. Greg Rose (Co-founder of the Titlist Performance Institute)
Artice on the Myths of Sport Specialization http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-sailor/myths-of-sports-specializ_b_8972126.html