Asha De Fre­itas-Mose­ley

As some­one who works in the sports med­i­cine in­dus­try, I strong­ly be­lieve in prop­er youth de­vel­op­ment and ex­po­sure. Keep­ing it as broad as I can, my eight-year old has tried foot­ball, crick­et, lawn ten­nis, golf, skate­board­ing, triathlon train­ing, ta­ble ten­nis, some trail bik­ing, even some yo­ga and stretch­ing. My four-year old has tried a lit­tle foot­ball, gym­nas­tics and bal­let in struc­tured set­tings but I al­low her to climb every­thing and any­thing pos­si­ble and ride her bike reg­u­lar­ly. My ob­jec­tive is to ex­pose them to as many sports, for as long as pos­si­ble to avoid the curse of "ear­ly spe­cial­i­sa­tion."

I know two fa­thers who had or have their son in gym­nas­tics or hip hop dance. One fa­ther told me that he put him in gym­nas­tics so that when his son scored goals in foot­ball, he would be able to cel­e­brate with flips. The oth­er fa­ther just thought that dance would help with his foot­work and co­or­di­na­tion. Re­gard­less of the rea­son, these fa­thers did their sons a huge favour in their "out of the box" think­ing.

One cou­ple I know, hav­ing learnt the hard way through two of their old­er off­spring, has tak­en it on them­selves to in­vest in two of their teenaged sons from now. Seek­ing the help of prop­er pro­fes­sion­als, a pro­gramme was de­vised to take the boys through a three-month pro­gramme that would ex­pose them twice a week to some habits that will serve in their best in­ter­est through­out their ath­let­ic life. I re­al­ly com­mend these par­ents on this in­sight­ful move as their chil­dren have frankly stat­ed that they are com­mit­ted to tak­ing their sport­ing ca­reers as far as they pos­si­bly can�Olympics not be­ing out of the ques­tion.

It is nev­er too ear­ly to start in­still­ing good habits in the lives of young ath­letes. Full body train­ing, prop­er warm-ups, prop­er stretch­es as part of the cool down, good re­hy­dra­tion habits, eat­ing right, train­ing the mind.... Cre­at­ing even a sin­gle well-round­ed ath­lete is a huge in­vest­ment of time and mon­ey–some­thing that we do not do much of here, mak­ing it quite the phe­nom­e­non when an ath­lete or a team con­quers the odds and makes it to the high­est lev­els of their sport.

In­juries in sport are in­evitable so it is on­ly com­mon sense to do as much as pos­si­ble to avoid the avoid­able ones. I can re­mem­ber dur­ing the days of Tiger-ma­nia when peo­ple talked up his amaz­ing strength and con­di­tion­ing regime and how this played such a huge fac­tor in his pro­fes­sion­al per­for­mance as a golfer.

How­ev­er, Tiger has now tak­en a leave of ab­sence to al­low him­self time to work on his game, re­turn­ing on­ly when he be­lieves he has re­turned it to a healthy com­pet­i­tive lev­el–how long that will take he does not know. A scroll through his laun­dry list of in­juries will un­veil that this $600 mil­lion net worth ath­lete has been deal­ing with in­juries since 1995 dur­ing his col­lege days and has had surg­eries done on sev­er­al parts of his body in­clud­ing his knees, el­bow and back. It would seem that Tiger is a vic­tim of ear­ly spe­cial­i­sa­tion, as he is said to have fo­cused on golf from a lit­tle boy.

The truth is, most sports are late spe­cial­i­sa­tion sports and they are cat­e­gorised as such based on a num­ber of fac­tors–kines­thet­ic aware­ness, the vi­su­al track­ing com­po­nent, and the phys­i­cal re­quire­ments of the sport which is de­vel­oped from a foun­da­tion of gen­er­al ath­leti­cism. Most team sports fall in­to the cat­e­go­ry of "late spe­cial­i­sa­tion." Not to be con­fused with or to dis­count the im­por­tance of "ear­ly ex­po­sure" which en­cour­ages a less in­ten­sive means of fa­mil­iari­sa­tion, "ear­ly spe­cial­i­sa­tion" is the de­lib­er­ate act of hon­ing in on the de­vel­op­ment of ath­let­ic skills as is rel­a­tive to a par­tic­u­lar sport. In­creas­ing­ly it is be­ing proven that ear­ly spe­cial­i­sa­tion is un­healthy both phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly for in­di­vid­u­als, es­pe­cial­ly in the long-term.

Some in­ter­est­ing read­ing I picked up al­though not a for­mal study that was done, in­volved the se­lec­tion of the top ten North Amer­i­can ath­letes across the four pop­u­lar sports of that cul­ture, ac­cord­ing to ES­PN rat­ings.

They found that on­ly 7 of them seem to have been sin­gle-sport ath­letes. They were able to find in­for­ma­tion on the oth­er 82 per cent of the ath­letes as hav­ing par­tic­i­pat­ed in sports out­side of the one they even­tu­al­ly went pro in. So keep it re­al and keep it broad if you want your kids to thrive in their sports. Don't get caught in the hype.

Asha De Fre­itas-Mose­ley M.S. A.T.C., A. has been an ath­let­ic train­er/ther­a­pist with the Na­tion­al Ath­let­ic Train­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion (NA­TA) for the past 12 years. She spe­cialis­es in the re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion of in­juries ex­pe­ri­enced in the lives of ac­tive and/or ath­let­ic pop­u­la­tions ap­ply­ing ac­tive re­lease tech­nique (ART), fa­cial stretch ther­a­py (FST) and con­tem­po­rary dry needling to com­ple­ment her train­ing as a cer­ti­fied cor­rec­tive ex­er­cise spe­cial­ist. If you would like a con­sul­ta­tion or have an in­jury, she can be reached at Pulse Per­for­mance Ltd., lo­cat­ed at #17 Hen­ry Pierre St., St. James. Tel: 221-2437.?