Asking the Right Questions: Creating a Learning Process for Young Athletes

Since resolutions are part of the New Year for many people, I believe a good thought provoking question to begin a “process” of growth for this year might be in order.  In searching for the right question for parents and/or coaches, I came upon a short blog by Kelvin Giles.

 In it, Kelvin pretty much took care of formulating the types of questions that should be asked by parents, teachers, coaches, administrators and performance leaders of any type. Below is an excerpt of his Nov.7, 2014 Blog.

For Physical Education, Junior Sports Clubs, Talent Development Strategies:  “are you developing the ability to Squat, Lunge, Pull, Push, Brace, Rotate and Hinge in every direction, plane, speed, amplitude and against all parts of the force continuum?” 

For all of the above AND parents, teachers and school administrators:

“What about nutrition and sleep?”

“Are you developing concentration, commitment, perseverance and self-discipline?”

“Are you also developing other life-skills including humility and respect?”

For coaches of youth and school sports:

“Is this your process for all participants regardless of their ability? Or are you just trying to win the next contest?”

Kelvin closes with the statement “I am looking forward to the day when these questions don’t have to be asked.

If you are a parent or coach who has just asked yourself those questions, “What is your response?”

Can you adequately assess whether life-skills like respect and humility are actually being taught?

Do you know for sure whether your children or athletes are eating correctly and getting enough sleep?

Have you spent time “teaching” the values of self-discipline, perseverance, concentration, commitment, respect, good nutrition and proper sleep habits?

Do specific sport skills take precedent over the basic movement skills (ability to Squat, Lunge, Pull, Push, Brace, Rotate and Hinge in every direction, plane, speed, amplitude and against all parts of the force continuum)  in your children’s sports team?

If all of the above questions are of concern to you then it may be time to consider HOW YOU CAN CREATE an environment for teaching/learning all of the above skills and traits.

According to Karen Cogen, Senior Sport Psychologist for the U.S. Olympic Committee, the following points can help to create an environment that leads to success without a focus on winning!

KEEP IT PERFORMANCE BASED by setting Performance or Process Goals rather than Outcome goals.

PLAY in the moment with the process of focus being the critical factor.

PRACTICE MINDFULNESS (paying attention to detail IN the moment).

TURN OFF YOUR BRAIN. To help athletes stay in the moment and practice Mindfulness, athletes should be encouraged to operate more on instinct and not think about movements.

TAKE “WIN” OUT OF YOUR VOCABULARY. The less a coach talks about winning and more about process and staying in the moment, the more likely it is that athletes will adopt that focus as well.

TALK TO ATHLETES’ PARENTS AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERS IN THEIR LIVES about adopting a performance approach. Coaches need to help influential people around an athlete to understand the performance-and-process philosophy and ask for cooperation in developing this approach.

Shifting the focus away from “winning” at all costs while learning focus on performance, one thing at a time, are successful ways of taking the pressure off athletes OF ALL AGES and teaching them that THE PROCESS is key to improving performances.

In the next few Blogs I will be continuing to focus on ways to create learning environments for young athletes and students. THESE will include development of MINDSET, GOAL SETTING, MOVEMENT BASED SKILL SETS (that enhance specific sport skills), and PROCESS-BASED MINDFULNESS.

Below are TWO articles with more information on Injuries to young athletes. The first involves recent information regarding arm (elbow and shoulder) injuries to young baseball players that sheds a “new light” on what most coaches have believed to be true.

The second offers Guidelines for Injury Prevention for young athletes.  Enjoy!

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A Connected Sleeve Finds That Pitchers Need To Alter Their Warm-Ups

Motus's Sleeve is taking aim at baseball's UCL surgery epidemic, and its first set of findings are counterintuitive.

By Matt Hartigan

The rapid rise of ulnar collateral ligament reconstructions, better known as Tommy John surgery, is hurting baseball. More than 20 major league pitchers have had surgery already in 2014, and this particular problem has begun appearing in players as young as 13 years old. It could become a serious legal liability for leagues and coaches if someone doesn't figure out how to curb the problem soon.

To date, understanding the stress a pitcher places on his or her ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) has been a function of rudimentary measures like height, weight, and velocity. But in September, pitchers from nine Fall Instructional League baseball teams wore a sensor-connected armband called the Motus Sleeve to establish a baseline understanding of the load placed on a player's most valuable ligament.

Screen of prototype application, consumer version to be released in early 2015

"Basically," explains Ben Hansen, vice president and CTO of Motus, "the Sleeve provides trends of performance and workloads on that UCL and that allows coaches to make better decision with their pitchers and managing their arms, as well as the players themselves."
The newly released findings are insightful, albeit counterintuitive. The startling conclusion: Traditional training and warm-up methods might be doing more harm than good.

"The numbers show that UCL stress between long toss (warm-up throws of over 180 feet), dry work (throwing motion sans baseball), bullpens, and live throws are not as proportional as we may have thought," reveals Hansen, "with each throw placing cumulative stress on the UCL. The sleeve now allows us to measure exactly how much each throw adds to this. You could never do this with your eyes, and now we can tell pitchers when they are throwing too much and with too much stress."
Motus found that a "long toss" taxes a player's UCL more than live, in-game throws–-a startling statistic considering the practice's prevalence during pre-game drills.

The sleeve itself contains reactive accelerometers and gyroscopes, and identifies different pitching motions on board. When a pitch is thrown, the data recorded is stored in the sleeve and then downloaded, either in real time or whenever an appropriate device is within Bluetooth range.

Motus's physics engine then takes the raw data from the sleeve's sensors, including arm speed and angle, and converts it into smart data. Measures such as arm torque and UCL stress become clear, allowing pitchers and coaches to better understand where there's a potential for injury.

Historically, the eye test and self-report have been the only reliable ways to determine player fatigue. Reflective markers and high-speed video technology have been used to develop 3-D models of players' bodies, but that takes the kind of time and effort that limits the tech's availability to maybe once or twice a year.

But Motus has found that pitchers sometimes drop their arm slot—from overhand toward sidearm—by as much as 19%during games. This change happens slowly, however. Over the first few innings, only about a 3% drop in arm angle occurs on average, meaning that over the course of the next few innings there can be a much sharper decline. Identifying when the dropoff occurs, then, is crucial not only to protecting a one-run lead, but also the pitcher's ligament.
When an athlete is stressed by too many throws, or too many high-torque throws," Hansen explains, "we can kind of see when they're at the end of these ranges where they break down. We also look at if their elbow is dropping or if their arm slot is changing dramatically, if it's a good release point anymore."

Where the sleeve truly excels is in its ability to map delivery or, the motion responsible for the wear and tear on a player's arm. "The hardware can detect any kind of throw," says Hansen, "from a Little Leaguer playing catch, to Justin Verlander's fastball, to Mitch Stetter's sidearm or underarm delivery. What we are really good at is then taking that data and getting mechanics off of it and computing things like torque at the elbow at different velocities."
Motus is aiming to use the sleeve to track throw mechanics during live competition as well, in order to pinpoint when a player is peaking. These single game numbers can then be compared to season averages to isolate an individual players' tendencies.

"We've been doing assessments, and specifically pitching assessments at our biomechanics lab for about four years now," says Joe Nolan, cofounder and CEO at Motus. "But the goal has always been to take these analytics that are specifically focused on optimizing performance and reducing the risk of injury, taking that lab experience and bringing it to the players on the field."

A consumer version of the Sleeve and accompanying app are in development, but for now Motus is working to improve their own data. Instead of simply tracking individual mechanics as a whole, the next version of the Sleeve will provide pitch-specific breakdowns so that coaches can compare stress across a pitcher's entire repertoire.
"Some feedback we've got from coaches already," says Hansen, "has been the ability to see if [a pitcher] has the same mechanics—the same arm speed and arm slot—for a fastball versus your curve ball. Coaches really preach that same delivery, that repeatable delivery. We're giving them a space to analyze that."

With the data already collected at the Fall Instructional League, Motus hopes to help stem the rash of Tommy John surgeries. The 3-D motion capture lab—which maps players' deliveries and mechanics on-site once the data is uploaded from the Sleeve—is portable and the company is confident that it will be used in spring training for as many as 20 teams when pitchers and catchers report in February.
And ultimately the Sleeve could be used in other sports as well.

"We've been collecting data and building the physics engines specifically for general mobility and stability, golf swing analysis, baseball batting, tennis, la crosse," says Nolan. "We're prepared to launch on a much wider basis. Right now, our focus and immediate goal is to perfect pitching and get to the market and prove it out. But right on the heels there's definitely multiple sports and multiple opportunities for the company."

For youth athletes, whichever sport they are training for is pretty irrelevant. Better movement patterns =better athlete in any sport.

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Guidelines for Young Athletes to Reduce Injuries

How Parents Can Set Age-Specific Time Limits

By Sumathi Reddy

Children are dedicating themselves to a single sport too early and spending too much time playing it, say doctors who are seeing more children coming in with overuse injuries.
Playing multiple sports leads to fewer overuse injuries, lower burnout rates and better overall athletes, experts say. Focusing on a single sport should only begin around the age of puberty or even later, when a child’s body has developed enough to handle the stress.

“The perception is you train early and only do a single sport and do as much as you can until you’re better than everyone else,” says Neeru Jayanthi, medical director of primary care sports medicine at Loyola University Health System in Chicago. “I think it’s pretty clear from the injury and performance-data side that that’s a terrible developmental model.”
In addition to acute injuries, such as concussions, doctors say they are seeing an increase in serious overuse injuries, such as stress fractures in the back, elbow-ligament injuries and damage to cartilage and underlying bone, known as osteochondral injuries. Such incidents can sideline athletes for one to six months or more.

Doctors are increasingly recommending that children diversify their sports activities to avoid overuse injuries. Dr. Neeru Jayanthi explains the risks on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty

Overuse injuries develop over time due to the repeated stress on the same bone, muscle or tendon. Children are at greater risk in part because their bones are still growing. Experts say as much as 50% or 60% of injuries in young athletes are due to overuse.

Enrollment in youth-sports programs is high, although participation in some team sports, including basketball, soccer and football, appears to have declined in recent years. A National Council of Youth Sports survey in 2008, the latest available, found that 60 million children between the ages of 6 and 18 years participated in an organized sport; 44 million of them did more than one sport.

Dr. Jayanthi and co-investigators have followed a group of 1,200 young athletes in the Chicago area, ages 7 to 18 years, since 2010. The research found that young athletes who are highly specialized in a single sport were 1.5 times more likely to develop injuries of any type compared with diversified athletes, even when the results were controlled for age and the number of hours spent playing. Serious overuse injuries were 2.3 times more common in highly specialized athletes than in others.

Dr. Jayanthi’s study also highlighted the risk of spending too many hours a week at sports. When the number of hours exceeded the age of the athletes, they were more likely to get injured and to suffer serious overuse injuries. And for young children, spending more than twice the time playing organized sports than in free play led to greater rates of injuries. The research, parts of which have been presented at medical conferences, has been accepted for publication in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, he said.

“This adult-driven, organized environment doesn’t allow a kid to self-regulate and say, ‘OK, I’m tired, I’m hurt, I don’t want to play right now,’ ” says Dr. Jayanthi.
Paul Stricker, a pediatrics sports medicine specialist at Scripps Clinic in San Diego, estimates he has seen a 25% to 30% jump in overuse injuries in athletes between the ages of 8 and 12 over the past five years. He recalls the first time an 8-year-old came in with a stress fracture to the shinbone, the youngest he had seen. The boy played soccer on four different teams. “It was complete overload,” says Dr. Stricker. “He was running and running constantly and the bone cracked.”

Preventing Injury

Youth-sports medical experts say overuse injuries are growing. Here are some rules of thumb to reduce risk:

·       Specializing in a single sport should be avoided until around puberty, when the body has matured. Earlier specialization can boost risk for overuse injuries and burnout and isn’t linked to better performance later.

Children shouldn’t participate in sports more hours a week than their age. They should also take off at least one to two days a week for physical and psychological recovery.

Young athletes should take at least two to three months away from a specific sport during the year and a week to two weeks off between seasons.

Free play should be encouraged. Studies show children and teens who spend twice as many hours a week in organized sports than in free play are prone to injuries at a greater rate. 

By the age of puberty, around 12 to 14, children who have been playing various sports have multiple skill sets that can be transferred from one sport to another. Their physical motor skills have developed, their vision has matured to fully track objects and their physiological growth gives them greater aerobic capacity and endurance, Dr. Stricker says.
“The body is much more capable of specializing at that age for multiple reasons,” he says.
A few sports are exceptions. In gymnastics and figure skating, for instance, peak athletic performance is often reached before full physical maturity.

Still, injuries are common for young people in these sports.
“I know I get injured a lot and I know that it’s just something that comes with so much gymnastics,” says Cecilia Doyle, a 13-year-old in Oak Park, Ill. “But I get really disappointed when I get injured because I don’t like taking a break from practice.”

Cecilia’s mother, Ana Garcia Doyle, last week brought her to Dr. Jayanthi because of suspected injuries. The doctor told her to take it easy for a while because of a strained back. She left the office with a cast on her right hand because of a stress fracture on the growth plate in her wrist, a problem she has had before. She has also had ankle issues. Cecilia does 15 hours of gymnastics a week, in addition to competitions.

Dr. Jayanthi has talked with Ms. Doyle and her husband, Jim, a corporate senior finance director, about the importance of the children playing a variety of sports. But Cecilia is “not going to pick up tennis at this point, she’s just not,” says the 44-year-old digital-media consultant. “She loves gymnastics.”

Ms. Doyle’s middle child—11-year-old Simon—is an avid soccer player, on a travel team. He has also taken up running. Dr. Jayanthi told the Doyles running can be considered diversification even though it is using many of the same muscle groups.

“I worry about my soccer player,” Ms. Doyle says. “He hasn’t had any serious injuries. But can he get all the way to high school without one? I really doubt it.”

The youngest child, Claudia, 5 years old, is enrolled in ballet and gymnastics, and will probably start soccer this summer, as she figures out what she likes.

“People often think overuse injuries are relatively benign and get better on their own,” says John P. DiFiori, chief of the division of sports medicine and nonoperative orthopaedics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles and a past president of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine. “In some cases the recovery time is quite prolonged and they can have long term growth complications.”

Dr. DiFiori, who wrote the medical society’s first position paper on overuse injuries and burnout in youth sports, published this year in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, said athletes who excel in youth sports often are children who mature earlier. They may be taller and stronger than others their age and have advanced behavioral or cognitive abilities, which help in following instructions and making swift decisions.

For parents, it can be difficult to balance between encouraging children to pursue what they love and worrying about injuries.

Mike Brown, an attorney in Chicago, introduced his children—Nyah, 11, and Kaden, 8—to tennis at age 3. They both love the sport, and Nyah by age 7 decided she wanted to focus on tennis, he says. Now she plays tennis year-round, four to five days a week. She suffered an overuse injury on her shoulder last year, which kept her out of competitions for a month. Kaden plays about the same amount of tennis but also plays other sports at various times of the year.

“I definitely worry about overuse injuries,” says Mr. Brown, who played tennis competitively in college. “But it’s tough. If you want to be good at tennis you really have to put in a lot of time and there are only so many hours.”