Should We Specialize Our Youth Athletes?

There are many sport performance facilities in the United States as our field is one of the fastest growing in the world. It is no doubt that there are many who do sports performance great and some that just miss the point of training youth athletes. Ever since sports performance has become a big thing to do for athletes and parents, the question always has been asked, should you specialize your athlete? The answer for the majority is absolutely NOT!!

The reason for the NO is because the athlete you will get is your average youth. An athlete who may be fast, jump high, move quickly or is strong, but you hardly get the athlete that possesses all of that. You have to work on your weakness to become the best. Will you get an athlete that just plays baseball? Probably, that doesn’t mean you don’t train them in other aspects of movement. Just because he pitches does not mean you just work on throwing mechanics. He needs plyometric work, speed work, strength training and finally conditioning. Most of our youth athletes play multiple sports which, in turn is fantastic, but makes our job harder to program.

Benefits of specializing in youth sports performance would be very slim but here are some points of interest:

• Increase movement pattern in a specific sport or position
• Increase flexibility in a specific muscle or chain of muscles
• Specific injury prevention
• Ability to excel at that 1 sport

Negatives of specializing in youth sports performance for 1 sport:

• Not overall flexible in muscle wise
• Conditioning can suffer if wanting to transfer to another sport
• Getting bored with the sport and training because they have to not because they want too
• Not gaining overall injury prevention for all sports and play
• Not experiencing other sports for fun
• Strength suffers do to specificity of the sport

As you can see there are some positives for specialization in one sport, but you can also see the negatives far out way the positives. When dealing with the youth and sports we must remember they are kids first and foremost. We need to treat them as such and not train at 14 year old like a professional athlete. Will there be some instances that a “special” athlete comes along, of course we then have to plan things out with the athlete, the parent and of course our staff. Youth athletes should play multiple sports, train for general sports performance (speed, agility, power and strength) and have fun while doing it.

There is an old saying that you only have one shot to be an adolescent, lets give them that opportunity while still producing results in sports performance across the board, not just for one sport.