Raising Healthy Athletes: The Crucial Role of Free Play and Smart Sports Choices for Injury Prevention
When it comes to raising great and healthy athletes, parents try their best. But you know as well as I do that best efforts don’t always lead to the best outcomes.
Exhibit A: one study showed that collegiate athletes, on average, have been surgically repaired—twice!—before stepping foot on campus. (1) One hundred percent of those teenagers had parents with the best intentions who signed them up for organized sports, which led to an average of two surgeries! These gruesome statistics prove that common beliefs about organized sports fail to achieve the outcome all parents want: healthy, intact children.
So how can parents be more effective at keeping their kids out of a physical therapy clinic and off a surgeon’s table?
If you’re a parent, first, you need to understand how tendons and ligaments become dense and robust.
Physical activity in childhood and adolescence determines the capacity of an adult’s ligaments and tendons—and some activities are better than others. Once puberty ends, connective tissue is less adaptable. Sometimes a twenty-something’s torn tendon has more to do with her childhood than “moving wrong.” (2)
No matter the age, the schedules that athletes must follow demand robust connective tissue. But fewer and fewer children are having the experiences they need to withstand the sports they want to play. American kids today starve for time and unstructured, un-adult-erated play. Twenty years ago, kids had:
12 percent more free time
50 percent more outdoor time
25 percent more free play (3)
Any one of those changes is a doozy.
All three?
Fuck.
FREE PLAY > ORGANIZED SPORTS
First, let me define free play as something physical. Not video games, TV, browsing the internet, or shopping. I mean cops and robbers, kick the can, roughhousing, climbing trees, and digging for worms. The stuff kids do when left alone and outside.
You might be surprised to know that kids are more active during physical free play than in organized sports. Why?
Kids don’t make drills. Adults do. Drills where the players show up only because they’ve been dropped off so they can stand around and wait their turn to repeat repetitive tasks.
Participation in sports doesn’t even ensure kids meet the recommended amount of physical activity in a day—when they go to practice! Seriously, one study showed that players spent 43 percent of practice inactive. (5)
Kids make games that are active, imaginative, and fun. Encourage those. Youngins visit a wider range of positions, too, because their innate creativity brings them there. Once you’re playing a sport, you’re confined to the movements the sport (or the coach) demands, a wrestler does wrestling things, and a wide receiver acts his part. The mind of a child has no such confines.
What You Should Do
So what are you supposed to do, free play or organized sports?
Yes.
When crafting chances for free play, involve them in the decision-making process. Starting with a blank canvas is hard, so ease the process by giving them a menu. Imagine you have a chest of sports equipment; you open it, close your eyes and grab three things at random. Invite your children to make a game out of those items and rope in as many other kids as possible. Play it in your backyard, on a grassy hill, or, if available, on a frozen lake. You could be the neighborhood parent who hosts a different game every weekend, ideally more frequently. The point is to regularly co-create something fun and variable.
Take them to places that promote free play—parks and river banks present different gifts. Let them throw pinecones for all I care. If they’re young enough, they’ll be enthralled to jump over every line in the sidewalk. Even picking toys up off the floor can be a race to save the world.
If they want to try rock climbing, don’t get them lessons. Just let them loose. If they want to climb dangerously high, give ‘em a harness and a rope and learn to belay them yourself. Once they truly need techniques to advance their skills, which might be months, maybe years later, find a coach they get along with, who lets them figure it out, and doesn’t spray them down with constant cues.
When kids and teens visit the bookends of force and velocity by throwing that pinecone as far as they can, leaping over the couch (the long way), or striding up a hill while hefting her younger brother, they develop their connective tissue and movement qualities to better handle sports (and life) years later. But their play needs to be frequent and diverse play, and I mean fre-quent. Before puberty, five to eight hours is suitable. After puberty, less time is appropriate. But more than a two hour window called “practice.”
Organized Sports
Okay, now the organized sport side of things…
If they want to play a sport, sign ‘em up! Try to choose a coach who understands the importance of play and can teach through games instead of drills. This coach will be hard to find, sadly, but it’s easier than watching your child tear her ACL and cheaper than paying for her subsequent surgery and rehab.
In addition, I’d encourage you to organize a group of kids of mixed ages and genders and let them play the sport outside of practice. Yes, without a coach or a referee. It doesn’t matter if they use the equipment “wrong.” In fact, I’d prefer they did, like shooting the basketball the opposite way through the hoop. Change the rules on a whim, “Only left-handed shots count! Oh, and spin moves earn you two points.”
Once I’m a parent, and I’ve signed up the chitlins for sports, I will consider the gaps each sport leaves behind. Let me explain.
The sports kids play result in different adaptations in their bodies. We can all agree that baseball is much less active than soccer or basketball. If my kid loves baseball, my challenge, and it may be a big one, is to get him to enjoy any other game that gets him moving in varied directions, durations, and intensities. Maybe it’s tennis, lacrosse, ultimate frisbee, or cross-country mountain biking. But it won’t be golf because it’s so repetitive and low-intensity.
Let’s say my other future kiddo only likes rock climbing because she has a Kilter Board in her house. You know I’m happy about that, but she’ll miss the bone density opportunities that come with more vigorous sports like volleyball. Bone density is also a developmental window that closes around twenty. (Osteoporosis is a pediatric disorder that comes on fifty to seventy years later. (6)) So my job isn’t to force her into a sport but invite her to different games that challenge her in different ways.
Within each season, I’d want her to have frequent and diverse play that develops her body holistically. I’d help her develop strength through parkour, rock climbing, or Ninja Warrior training. I’d invite her to hike to the top of her favorite Yosemite waterfall for her muscular endurance. She’d develop her quick twitch fibers by sprinting after me, her mom, or the dog. She’d learn to keep her ankles intact by breaking others’ during tag, soccer, flag football, or Steal The Bacon. She’d develop her jumping skills, and bone density, through volleyball, parkour, or a really competitive game of The Floor Is Lava.
I know it may seem like you’re sacrificing your child’s skills in his favorite sport, but it’s a short-term loss for a long-term gain, and the choice is incredibly one-sided. He may not be the star player of his middle school team, but he could be an All-American his sophomore year of college. Better yet, he could graduate having played every game because he was healthy, because he had dense and robust tendons and ligaments from a duet of free play and organized sports. You never had to see a piece of him tear in two because you made hard but smart choices a decade before.
—AE
If you want more, I have a whole chapter dedicated to childhood development in my forthcoming book. It’s that crucial in making non-contact injuries extinct.
References
Matheson, Gordon O., Scott Anderson, and Kevin Robell. "Injuries and illnesses in the preparticipation evaluation data of 1693 college student-athletes." The American Journal of Sports Medicine 43, no. 6 (2015): 1518-1525.
In my forthcoming book, I have a whole chapter dedicated to childhood, and it has all the research I reference in this post.
Barreiro, Joshua A., and Rick Howard. "Incorporating unstructured free play into organized sports." Strength & Conditioning Journal 39, no. 2 (2017): 11-19.
Knoop, Hans Henrik, and A. F. Jensen. "Time for playful learning?-a cross-cultural study of parental values and attitudes towards children's time for play." Final Report. Billund, DK: LEGO Learning Institute (2003).
Leek, Desiree, Jordan A. Carlson, Kelli L. Cain, Sara Henrichon, Dori Rosenberg, Kevin Patrick, and James F. Sallis. "Physical activity during youth sports practices." Archives of pediatrics & adolescent medicine 165, no. 4 (2011): 294-299.
Peak bone mass is built in the first two decades of life. Then it is all about maintenance.
Zulfarina, Mohamed S., Ahmad M. Sharkawi, Zaris-SM AQILAH-SN, Sabarul-Afian Mokhtar, Shuid A. Nazrun, and Isa Naina-Mohamed. "Influence of adolescents’ physical activity on bone mineral acquisition: a systematic review article." Iranian journal of public health 45, no. 12 (2016): 1545.