Overuse Injuries and Year Round Training

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Apr 28, 2014
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BTW to my surprise almost all of DDs injuries she would have, have all but gone away since she started lifting heavy 18 months ago.
 
Jun 8, 2016
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This emphasis on 3 (organized) sports must stop.
Its pointless
I tend to agree although a possible benefit of playing another sport is that you get to compete during the offseason e.g. playing something where there is a winner and a loser. This is probably most beneficial at a younger age. IMO if a kid enjoys playing other sports let them. If they don't, then don't force them. My sister earned 12 varsity letters in HS and she has said a number of times that in hindsight it was too much. She was burned out by her Senior year. She ended up playing D1 volleyball in college..the one sport she didn't pick up till HS. She had offers to play in college in the other two sports.
 
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NBECoach

Learning everyday
Aug 9, 2018
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From time to time some of our HS pitchers played on the basketball team. It helped them work on conditioning, agility, and kept their legs in shape in a supervised (coaches and trainer) environment.

We always encourage prospective players to look at their academic workload, and employment schedule before they choose to play a sport or multiple sports. Every once in a while we will lose a player who then discovers they cannot fit softball into the mix or will not go out for a different sport.
 
May 27, 2013
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DD’s high school requires all students to play a sport each season because there is no gym class during the day. She actually really enjoys her fall and winter sports because she does not play varsity so there is much less pressure on her. Both sports require a lot of running, agility, and hand-eye coordination and they also have assigned weight room days. She definitely is in top shape come varsity softball season.

To me it’s just what the player prefers. For dd, she truly enjoys different team sports. She gets pretty bored during the summers when she’s in the gym by herself.
 
Jun 12, 2015
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Our team has the players doing strength and agility twice a week right now. I do think it helps. Strengthening the muscles around problem areas seems to be recom
BTW to my surprise almost all of DDs injuries she would have, have all but gone away since she started lifting heavy 18 months ago.

I've encouraged mine repeatedly about weight lifting and also yoga, my personal favorite exercise. But she's in slacker mode currently. I think she'll always be all-out when she's actually AT practice, but her outside practice/exercise motivation has dropped significantly over the past year and a half or so (she just turned 13 in Sep). I've been letting it go ftmp, because I would rather she not quit and I can feel it on the horizon if we get too pushy. She still loves the softball part, and I don't want to kill that with too much extra stuff she's not into right now.

ETA: her team is doing strength and agility twice a week over the winter, starting at the end of October, so she's not doing nothing. Just not much on her own.
 
Jun 8, 2016
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I've encouraged mine repeatedly about weight lifting and also yoga, my personal favorite exercise. But she's in slacker mode currently. I think she'll always be all-out when she's actually AT practice, but her outside practice/exercise motivation has dropped significantly over the past year and a half or so (she just turned 13 in Sep).
13 is rough..My sister and handled that age differently (we are 13 months apart..me being older). She locked herself in her room to get away from my parents and I would escape to the ballfield...she had a much more successful athletic career though so... :LOL:
 
Jun 12, 2015
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13 is rough..My sister and handled that age differently (we are 13 months apart..me being older). She locked herself in her room to get away from my parents and I would escape to the ballfield...she had a much more successful athletic career though so...
I try to remember being 13 and how hard it was. Everything mattered SO much. The stupidest things felt like the end of the world. It's still not easy to deal with though. My older daughter is 15. My house is filled with crazy hormones.

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Jun 12, 2015
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Mine are spread out (DD is 10, DS1 is 4 and DS2 is 1) so the craziness will come in waves..
It's just a different kind of crazy. I'd actually take teenagers over toddlers any day. Toddlers are my parenting Achilles heel. It's a good thing they're so cute.

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Dec 11, 2010
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I've said this before but IMO it is not the amount of hours of sports involved that is the issue, it is the % of those hours which take place in a pressurized environment. From the age of probably 9 or 10 till I left HS, I probably played either basketball or baseball literally 355 out of the 365 days of the year. However a very high percentage of those hours were either working on my own or playing with my friends. Stress does weird stuff to the body.

This is a paragraph everyone should read again.

Some sports wisdom really translates to the rest of your life and this is one.

Stress is a strange thing. It corrodes your brain and your body. The worst thing about stress is it can work on you when you don’t even realize it. It can be unidentified. Misidentified. Heck, anticipation of something good happening can be as hard on a person as the dread of something bad happening.

So: as a parent, as player, as a coach, as an employee or an employer how can an awareness of this help you train, practice and compete better and healthier?

ETA: I probably should have ended this post here, lol

Have you ever had a boss or a coach that created an environment where people just seemed to effortlessly give their best day in and day out? Where big things got accomplished so routinely that people almost quit noticing the success?

Have you ever been on a team or in a workgroup loaded with talent that just didn’t ever accomplish anything worth doing? They check all the boxes. Everyone gets high marks on their twice per year evaluation. But nothing worth remembering was accomplished....?

Ever try to figure out why?

Pattar‘s post is part of it. It’s one corner of the blanket you can throw over this enormous, unexplainable deal. Another corner of the blanket is “mindfulness”, aka “being in the zone” And no, I won’t take a stab at ‘splaining that one, lol!
 
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