How Much Sports Training is Too Much?
The pressure on youth athletes to perform at top levels is intense. When they aren’t on the field playing, there’s practice. When they aren’t practicing, they have their pick of other opportunities to amp up their game. But how much sports training is too much for a young athlete?
Of course, the answer to the how much training question is going to vary from individual to individual. You need to take into consideration the athlete’s level of interest, age, experience, goals, personality and more (not to mention the parents’ pocketbook).
Writing for US Youth Soccer, Dr. Lyle Micheli, a co-founder of the world’s first sports medicine clinic for children noted, “not a great deal of hard data is available.” After all, “to find out exactly how much training is safe, we'd have to take large groups of kids and put them through grueling sports drills and wait there with our clipboards for them to collapse in pain.”
Unsurprisingly, there aren’t many kids volunteering for that study, and parents aren’t turning them over to that testing either.
So, how do you know when training is too much? There are some common indicators:
The young athlete’s attitude about training sours
They don’t want to go to practice
They get tired easily
They don’t perform as well as in the past
They are more irritable and uncooperative with teammates and coaches
How Much Can Kids Train
Still, the problem remains that you don’t really want to push young athletes to this point before realizing they are overtraining. The goal is to work smarter, not harder.
Dr. Micheli suggests a general rule is that “children shouldn’t train for more than 18-20 hours a week.” However, he notes that as a major competition approaches there will be pressure to train more.
The American Council on Exercise suggests the “new rule of thumb” is that young athletes shouldn’t train more hours in a week than they are years old. ACE cites a Chicago study of 1,206 athletes, ages eight to 18, to state, “youth athletes who play a sport for more hours than their age per week were 70 percent more likely to incur serious overuse injuries than other types of injuries.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children should have at least one day off each week, and at least three months off from a specific sport throughout the year. The AAP also recommends younger athletes be given the opportunity to try out different sports and avoid specialization before the age of 12.
Problems with Over Training
Well, there’s that list of negative impacts we started out with. But, you should also know that pushing past training limits can have long-term effects. Joint pain could become an issue. Or abnormalities in growth or maturation could occur.
Pre-adolescent athletes face specific risks. “Children’s bodies respond to training differently from adults. Growth plates in the knees, feet and shoulders make these body parts particularly vulnerable to overuse. And then there’s the awkwardness and lack of body awareness and control that is prevalent in growing children, all of which increases the risk of injury among young athletes.”
Youth sports used to be primarily about fun and character development. The environment is more competitive. In this climate, it’s important to encourage continued enthusiasm for a sport with close attention paid to how much time is being spent training.
