Hey kids, how is your body coping with being back to sport?

Younger athletes have returned to sport with enthusiasm in the last few weeks and for many, the sudden spike in load and intensity will have been a shock to their young bodies after months and months off from competitive sport. Athletes of all ages can cope with incredibly high volumes of activity …if their bodies are given time to adapt and get strong enough to tolerate the higher load.

Would you run a marathon without a gradual increase in training? Hopefully, the answer is no!

However, when it comes to kids, we don’t consider that after a long break from a specific sport that they should resume that sport or activity gradually. It might not surprise you then that the highest number of young athletes seen in a physio clinic is in the last week of September every year when growing bodies start to feel the effects of the “too much too soon” return to sport. In the younger kids, their heels and knees start to ache as muscles struggle to keep up with bony growth and cause “traction” injuries at the muscles attachments and older teens start to feel pain around the hip and pelvis.

So, is it too late to save a young athlete from the pain and frustration of an injury?

Not at all. Using the advice of many running coaches, adding a quieter week after 3 hard weeks can be effective in allowing the body to recover and adapt. Reducing the intensity of the sessions or taking a few rests days during the 4^th week might well allow the “growing pains” to settle and with good nutrition and prioritising sleep the athlete soon recovers.

A build-up of fatigue over days and weeks might reduce the athlete’s ability to exercise and increase the risk of sickness and injury. If your young athlete looks tired, is starting to get sore throats, or has recently had COVID-19 then help them learn to listen to their bodies and take a rest day or attend a training session and with the cooperation of the coach do a lighter session focussing on technical greater than fitness aspects of athlete development.

A great way to assess if an athlete is coping or whether they should train is to use a simple wellness score. Each day before training, ask them to score each symptom out of 5 where 1 is poor and 5 is great. Each athlete is different but on average if they score < 8 = don’t train or between 9-12 = train lighter.