National Athletic Trainers’ Association position statement: prevention of pediatric overuse injuries.
Valovich McLeod TC, Decoster LC, Loud KJ, Micheli LJ, Parker JT, Sandrey MA, White C.
J Athl Train. 2011 Mar-Apr;46(2):206-20.
As a new service of SMR we will try to provide announcements for new position statements and professional guidelines/recommendations as they are released. In April 2011, the NATA released a new position statement on the best practices for the prevention of overuse injuries in pediatric athletes (ages 6 to 18 years). NATA position statements are available to the public and we encourage our readers to read the latest addition to a nice list of position statements provided by the NATA (see below for a complete list).
Additional information about NATA Position Statements, including PowerPoint Presentations, can be found at https://www.nata.org/position-statements.
Additional Links:
Consensus statements: https://www.nata.org/consensus-statements
Official statements: https://www.nata.org/official-statements
Great job and great idea guys on promoting the Position Statements as well as keeping us posted on future statements that are released.
I feel the recently released statement on the pediatric athlete is an important issue within our profession at this time.
Its important enough to me that I've created my own Athletic Training blog centered on this issue. You can follow my blog at http://www.tnowakowski.blogspot.com
I will also cover an array of issues in Athletic Training as they arise but I'm trying to make it more of a clinical based blog. Its brand new and I'd love to mesh it together hand in hand with what you guys are doing here.
Great job again and keep up the good work!
A few things about this statement that I don't really understand. And please keep in mind these are not criticisms just questions.
First the statement mentions that the increased volume of intense, and highly specific exercise is a major factor in over use injuries and then it goes on to say that a good prevention would be preseason exercise programs. How can more exercise be the cure for too much exercise?
I understand the idea of the preseason training program would be to focus on weak areas and increased endurance but its still more exercise in a population that is having these issues partly because of constant and increasingly intense exercise participation.
And on that same topic many kids these days don't have an off season. They play their sport year round for their school and a travel team often at the same time. So a pre season training program would never work because there is no preseason.
Secondly it mentions increased training for coaches and parents in recognition of overuse injury signs and symptoms. I agree this would be helpful but I don't see how its feasible. Where are they going to get this training? Who is going to pay for it? How are we going to convince coaches and parents to take more time out of their usually already busy schedule to pay for medical training? How can a coach of a litle leauge baseball team be expected to have a full time job, go through medical training (which takes many health professionals upwards of 6 years of full time schooling and training), and still have time to put together workout and practice schedules, plan for games, watch film, and have time for them selves and their families? How are we going to convince coaches and parents to pay the additional cost of constantly seeing specialists? What effect is all this going to have on participation in school , personal, and family activities?
I agree completely that better PPEs and referrals to specialists for prevention would probably help reduce injury rates but who is going to pay for the research, education, implementation, management, monitoring, and associated increase in healthcare costs for all of this? Who is going to pay the health care professionals for their time to do an hour long highly hands on and personalized PPE with highly personalized documentation and planning for each of the thousands of pediatric athletes every season? Who is going to be in charge of analysis of results of these PPEs and who is going to decided on a case by case basis what specialists should be seen by each athlete and for what? Who is going to pay for all the supplies that would be required to do these intensive PPEs, monitor patient progress, analyze the results, decide what is working and what is not? Who is going to monitor teams and schools for compliance for all these procedures? Who is going to decided how often these PPEs need to be done and who is "qualified" to do them?
To put it simply, I agree with most everything in the position statement. I just don't see how all this increased resource commitment is possible especially in todays world where money seems to be a huge problem for many families and especially for many schools and sports teams.
And to me, none of this addresses the actual problem of constant, intense, and highly specific exercise at an increasingly young age with increasingly diminishing rest time.
So I read it a third time and there are statements addressing the problems of high volume, high intensity, highly specific training at an increasingly younger age. So ignore my last statement.