Asha De Fre­itas-Mose­ley

School is out and it is that time of year that has some­how got­ten to be known as "sum­mer time" in our land of wet and dry sea­sons, and moms and dads are go­ing to be busy try­ing to find "sum­mer camps" to sign their chil­dren in­to.

While the con­ve­nience of know­ing your child is be­ing looked af­ter and be­ing men­tal­ly stim­u­lat­ed in some sort of struc­tured fash­ion for any­where be­tween five and sev­en hours dur­ing the work­day is a huge re­lief for the par­ents, for the child it is an op­por­tu­ni­ty to change fo­cus from aca­d­e­mics to some­thing else, be it mu­sic, art and craft, culi­nary, lan­guage or ath­let­ics.

Se­lect­ing which camp would like­ly be based on some­thing al­ready known to be of in­ter­est to the child. For ob­vi­ous rea­sons if your child en­joys play­ing foot­ball, more than like­ly a par­ent would put them in a foot­ball camp, like­wise for swim­ming, squash or gym­nas­tics.

It is a great op­por­tu­ni­ty for the young­ster to fo­cus on de­vel­op­ing their tech­ni­cal in­tel­lec­tu­al acu­men for their sport. Rather than com­pet­ing for time against the usu­al vic­tors of school/ex­tra lessons/home­work as is the norm dur­ing the aca­d­e­m­ic term, the child can switch gears, ex­plor­ing his po­ten­tial in a set­ting out­side of the class­room.

While I com­plete­ly sup­port the use of the Ju­ly/Au­gust va­ca­tion time to fur­ther your child's skills in the sport of their pas­sion, I chal­lenge par­ents to step out of this com­fort zone as well for a week or two of this hol­i­day pe­ri­od. Con­sid­er tak­ing ad­van­tage of this time to ex­pose them to phys­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ty out­side of their main sport. Ob­vi­ous­ly, the di­rec­tion in which you take this must be care­ful­ly con­sid­ered as you do not want to en­rol a child in­to some­thing they will mis­er­ably en­dure and in­still pos­si­ble feel­ings of hav­ing mis­placed your pre­cious earn­ings but it is pos­si­ble for a child pas­sion­ate about crick­et to en­joy spend­ing their time rid­ing a bike or swim­ming, the phys­i­cal and men­tal ben­e­fits of which can be eas­i­ly dis­missed.

Most of the in­juries that I see with young­sters, par­tic­u­lar­ly teenagers, are re­lat­ed to overuse due to ear­ly spe­cial­i­sa­tion. Just to be clear, ear­ly spe­cial­i­sa­tion refers to the year-round par­tic­i­pa­tion of a child to one sport (jeeze! Just to write that out re­al­ly em­pha­sis­es how ab­surd that no­tion is for a young, de­vel­op­ing body). It is fur­ther char­ac­terised by such par­tic­i­pa­tion at a high lev­el of in­ten­si­ty ear­ly in life in both train­ing and com­pe­ti­tion in or­der to en­hance per­for­mance and be a recog­nised con­tender in the sport.

Over the past five years or so, the 10-year/ 10,000-hour rule which states that it takes 10 years or 10,000 hours of con­scious ef­fort to­wards prac­tice to reach the high­est lev­el of per­for­mance has pret­ty much be­come com­mon knowl­edge and ac­cept­ed truth.

Daniel Coyle, the New York Times best­selling au­thor of books such as The Tal­ent Code, and Lance Arm­strong's War, fo­cus­es on this 10,000-hour rule in his blog post­ed June 7, 2013, called For­get 10,000 Hours–In­stead, Aim for 10 Min­utes.

In it he men­tions the gath­er­ing of about 300 coach­es, play­ers, gen­er­al man­agers, and tal­ent-de­vel­op­ment ex­perts lo­cat­ed glob­al­ly at the "Lead­ers in Per­for­mance" con­fer­ence held in New York this year where it was crit­i­cised that the 10,000-hour rule has cre­at­ed some­what of a mind­less ob­ses­sion amongst par­ents and coach­es, see­ing pro­grammes that go as far as re­quir­ing ath­letes to clock in and out of their prac­tice times like fac­to­ry work­ers with time cards. In­stead, they re­turn some of the cred­it to a fo­cus on qual­i­ty and not just quan­ti­ty to cre­ate ex­cel­lence.

In re­mem­ber­ing that bal­ance of qual­i­ty and quan­ti­ty, keep in mind the counter-ef­fects of ear­ly spe­cial­iza­tion in young ath­letes. High in­ten­si­ty train­ing be­fore reach­ing phys­i­cal mat­u­ra­tion in­creas­es the risk of in­jury sig­nif­i­cant­ly which can short­en their ath­let­ic ca­reer and im­pact on their long-term qual­i­ty of life.

So, in ex­plor­ing ways to oc­cu­py your child dur­ing the Ju­ly/Au­gust va­ca­tion, con­sid­er mak­ing a de­lib­er­ate ef­fort to step away from their main sport not to hin­der the progress but pos­si­bly pro­mote it by re­mind­ing their mus­cles of the dy­nam­ic oth­er ways it can work there­by re­turn­ing some mea­sure of bal­ance.

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