Nutrition/Fitness content courtesy of US Youth Soccer

Sports Training - How Much is Too Much?
[Part 1 of 2]

by Dr. Lyle Micheli, M.D.

Kids are starting sports earlier and training harder. Incentives to win are growing, sometimes literally - I've seen trophies almost bigger than the little athletes who've won them! With higher stakes have come pressures to perform better by being fitter and more skilled. Usually, this is achieved through repetition, repetition, repetition - whether it is serving a tennis ball, pitching a baseball, or performing a figure-skating double axel.

In kids' sports programs, fitness and skill development have to be balanced with the need to avoid overtraining. Overtraining is when the athlete is required to do too much - either physically or mentally, or both.

Parents need to be sensitive to changes in performance and attitude that suggest their kids are being pushed too hard. Such changes may be precursors of physical injury.

Signs of overtraining
 - Slower times in distance sports such as running, cycling, and swimming
 - Deterioration in execution of sports plays or routines such as those performed in figure skating and gymnastics
 - Decreased ability to achieve training goals
 - Lack of motivation to practice
 - Getting tired easily
 - Irritability and unwillingness to cooperate with teammates

Unfortunately, the tendency when a parent or coach is confronted with signs of overtraining is to push the child harder. But if overtraining is the culprit, any increase in training will only worsen the situation.
And as I have suggested, training too much may eventually lead to overuse injuries in which actual damage to the bones and soft tissues occurs because the body can't recover from the repetitive physical demands placed on it by sport activity.

This raises an important question: How much is too much? Not a great deal of hard data is available on this subject. That's because to find out exactly how much training is safe, we'd have to take large groups of kids and put them through grueling sports drills and wait there with our clipboards for them to collapse in pain. I don't think we could find too many parents who'd be willing to turn over their kids for such tests!

How long can kids train?
As a general rule, children shouldn't train for more than 18-20 hours a week. If a child is engaged in elite competition there may be pressures to train for longer - especially in the lead-up to a major event. Anytime a child trains for longer than this recommended length of time she must be monitored by a qualified sports doctor with expertise in young athletes. This is to make sure abnormalities in growth or maturation do not occur. Any joint pain lasting more than two weeks is justification for a visit to the sports doctor.

It's also important to ensure restrictions against excessive sports activity are not exceeded. For instance, young baseball pitchers in America are not allowed to pitch more than seven innings a week. While this restriction is mostly adhered to in the game setting, it is pointless if kids are pressured by their coaches to throw excessively during practices (parents, too, need to remember that going to the park with their kid to "throw a few" needs to be counted as part of the number of pitches he makes).

In general, young baseball players shouldn't perform more than 300 "skilled throws" a week; any more than this and the risk of injury dramatically increases.

(To be continued in the December issue of Cal South E-News...)

Dr. Lyle Micheli co-founded and is director of the world's first sports medicine clinic for children, located at Boston Children's Hospital. He is also the chairperson of the Massachusetts Governor's Committee on Physical Fitness and Sports, and a past president of the American College of Sports Medicine.