The Bubble Lounge
Finding Balance with Kids and Sports with Dr. Henry B. Ellis, M.D.
Unlock the secrets to keeping your young athlete healthy and happy with Dr. Henry B. Ellis, M.D., a leading pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Scottish Rite in Frisco. Join us as we tackle the challenging landscape of youth sports, examining the intense pressures parents face and the financial and emotional toll of competitive environments. Dr. Ellis shares valuable insights on achieving a balanced approach to sports participation, debunking the myth that early specialization is necessary for future success.
Dr. Ellis offers practical strategies for injury prevention, stressing the need for diverse training approaches including strength training and yoga. Learn why limiting training hours and ensuring kids take breaks from sports are crucial steps in fostering healthier training environments.
For more information about Henry B. Ellis M.D. click here
Browse resources for young athletes here Sports Nutrition I Scottish Rite for Children.
Have questions for Dr. Ellis? Send him an email at sportsmedicine@tsrh.org.
Want to learn more about research projects at Scottish Rite for Children and opportunities to participate? Visit http://community.tsrhc.org/community-research.
This episode sponsored by Kathy L Wall State Farm Agency SA Oral Surgeons and Hello, Nanny! To learn more about our sponsors visit Kathy L Wall State Farm Agency, SA Oral Surgeons and Hello, Nanny!
Unlock the secrets to keeping your young athlete healthy and happy with Dr. Henry B. Ellis, M.D., a leading pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Scottish Rite in Frisco. Join us as we tackle the challenging landscape of youth sports, examining the intense pressures parents face and the financial and emotional toll of competitive environments. Dr. Ellis shares valuable insights on achieving a balanced approach to sports participation, debunking the myth that early specialization is necessary for future success.
Dr. Ellis offers practical strategies for injury prevention, stressing the need for diverse training approaches including strength training and yoga. Learn why limiting training hours and ensuring kids take breaks from sports are crucial steps in fostering healthier training environments.
For more information about Henry B. Ellis M.D. click here
Browse resources for young athletes here Sports Nutrition I Scottish Rite for Children.
Have questions for Dr. Ellis? Send him an email at sportsmedicine@tsrh.org.
Want to learn more about research projects at Scottish Rite for Children and opportunities to participate? Visit http://community.tsrhc.org/community-research.
This episode sponsored by Kathy L Wall State Farm Agency SA Oral Surgeons and Hello, Nanny! To learn more about our sponsors visit Kathy L Wall State Farm Agency, SA Oral Surgeons and Hello, Nanny!
This episode sponsored by Stewart Arango Oral Surgery Learn more at saoralsurgeonscom. And Tequila Comos, luxury tequila refined. Ask for it by name at Pogo, spex or your favorite liquor store. And Kathy L Wall State Farm Agency Learn more at kathylwallcom. Welcome to the Bubble Lounge.
Speaker 3:I'm Martha Jackson and I'm Nellie Sciutto, and today our guest is Dr Ellis, who's going to talk to us all about sports and how to not micromanage our children so much, because we all overdo it.
Speaker 2:Yes, that is right. Dr Ellis is a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Scottish Rite in Frisco and he specializes in children, obviously, and he is going to talk to us about how much is too much with our kids in sports.
Speaker 3:And also how to balance it when you have an athlete and they're training or a cheerleader anything any kind of athlete and they're cheerleading. They're practicing and working out 12 months of the year. It's good to have some downtime. He has some great ideas on how to balance that.
Speaker 2:That's right. The discussion that we have with him is so amazing because he just tells us how we can have a little bit of downtime, like what you're saying, nellie. So if you're a parent of an athlete, you have to listen to this episode, because it has so much great information. Are you looking for oral surgeons with serious skill? Well then you should visit our friends at Stewart and Arango. They have expertise in just about every type of oral surgery you can imagine. That means they offer full-scope oral, facial and implant surgeries for both children and adults, and when I say skill, I mean it.
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Speaker 3:Welcome to the show, Dr Ellis it's great to be here.
Speaker 2:So it is the first week of summer and it seems like a really good time to talk about sports injuries and recovery and all that type of thing, and I understand that you are the man to talk about that.
Speaker 1:Well, it's one of my favorite things to talk about. I live in a world where my practice takes care of kids who get injured, but my life is as a parent of a young athlete in an area that is highly competitive and we always are trying to push our kids and do more and pay for more, and so I feel like my day job and my home job are kind of competing interests, and so it's always a great opportunity to talk about this.
Speaker 3:Well, it's interesting that you said that, because you just said something about paying money, the money that it costs, et cetera, and I think I have a college athlete and just the money spent on trainers et cetera, like outside of just school. You got to train outside of it.
Speaker 1:Is that?
Speaker 3:your opinion? I mean, it seems to happen a lot, or am I just another Highland Park mom?
Speaker 1:You know, what I've learned is you know, I've learned it's really not Highland Park and sometimes we will say it's a Park City thing, but it is really the culture in America.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:And you know, particularly in the South, because the weather is so nice all year round that you year round sports are by far more prevalent. But this is really I'm seeing this all across the Dallas-Fort Worth area, north Texas and all of Texas. So you know, we all, you know we live in the park cities and we see all the pressures of the park cities, but I'd say the problem is all over and you know we all need to be aware of it. Now you know the cost and the more. I mean it's an industry, yes, and you know, as we talked about before, or maybe you guys have heard me say before.
Speaker 1:I mean it's an industry, yes, and you know, as we talked about before, or maybe you guys have heard me say before I mean, you know the industry of the NFL is $18 billion. The industry of youth sports is $37 billion, holy cow. And so you want to talk about money and investments. You know there's a growing interest in youth sports right now and at its current growth, it's going to be $70 billion by 2030. So it's a big deal and we're paying a lot of money for it.
Speaker 3:So let me ask you about that because it's interesting. I like I have lots of athletes in my family. What like do you think that that's necessary? Do you think that people push their kids too early, like you hear about some of these guys who are in the NBA who played with my nephew and they're like they didn't really start playing basketball aggressively until they were like nine and some people argue that that's a good, it's a better perspective than starting your kids super young because they can get burnt out. I just want to know your thoughts on that.
Speaker 1:Well, there's no doubt. I mean burnout is you know the? When a kid gets burnout, it happens, and it happens a lot. And it's burnout, it's injury, it's. I'm tired of hurting it's boy, I'm tired of having the anxiety of winning. There's a lot of reasons for it. You know, when you look at the NCAA data, it is not showing us that you have to commit to a sport at a young age, that you have to be 100% dedicated to a sport at a young age, that you have to be 100% dedicated to a sport at a young age. I mean, oftentimes athletes are athletes and skills are skills. You know there are so many things that go into being a good athlete. I mean, it's dedication, it's leadership, it's teamwork, it's, you know, life balance. And you know, we know that if you want to be an NCAA collegiate athlete, you don't have to do everything that we're doing right now. So there is a misconception there.
Speaker 2:So one thing that I remember is when Sean and I first moved to the Park Cities and we our daughter was just a toddler at the time and we were walking around and walked by a park and there was this father with a son that was literally a toddler as well and I remember him like really getting onto the toddler and like going get your head into the game. I mean that's like the one of my first memories of moving to the Park Cities and it just kind of really struck me and I didn't quite get that that was the mentality here until a little bit later, but it really is. So many things are driven by the parents to push their kids, to want them to be into sports.
Speaker 1:Well, it's probably a good opportunity for me to say you know, it's easy to preach this, but I'm not. You know, casey and I are not the perfect parents. You know it is really hard to always practice what you preach.
Speaker 3:I mean.
Speaker 1:So I'm not. I'm not at all saying that I have it perfect. I feel like I know what are good habits and I think that Casey and I oftentimes talk about what they are, but we cheat every once in a while.
Speaker 1:And we know that, hey, we push our kids a little bit too hard here and there, and we've seen it in our own household. But we try to find the balance. We talk about the balance and we really try to set our goals. You know there is probably a balance between tough love and just letting kids be kids, and you know there is. You know, sometimes we try to baby our kids too much, sometimes we give them too much tough love, sometimes we just don't let them have fun. And so, if you think about the brain and maturation and growth, we all need the times in which we're really serious, whether that's school or sports. And then we need the time in which we just relax. In our house we call it vegging you just sit on the couch and you relax.
Speaker 1:Well, it used to be that, perhaps a kid, their serious time was when they're at school, and let's say that's eight to four or five or three, whatever it is, and then their sports was fun or what they did in an extracurricular activities was fun. Well, now our kids are devoted to their whole days of very high intense and they don't have that ups and downs of seriousness it's. I got to be serious at school and I got to have the pressures of school and then you come home and then you immediately go to whatever your extracurricular activity is and we're pushing them as hard with that as well, and that's the problem. You've got to find that fun not so fun, and you've got to have that balance in your household. And probably a little tough love is okay as long as you complement that with a little bit of something fun to do on the side, almost like work hard, play hard. Yeah, exactly I mean. But if you think about it, sometimes we don't do that as well as we like.
Speaker 2:No, I agree 100%. It's like you, just go straight from school to sports. I saw it so much in our family this semester and it feels so good to have a break from that right now.
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Speaker 2:Tell us what is one of the main injuries you're seeing with our young kids right now.
Speaker 1:Well, there's two main types of injuries that we see. So you have what I would call your acute injury. So ACL elbow injuries and throwers, the anterior cruciate ligament. Many of you guys have all heard of that. It's very common in soccer, female soccer players, football players, basketball players. What I see more commonly is what we call overuse injuries, which is where the growth plate or the bone or the tendon, it can't keep up with the stress that we put it under and so it kind of goes through these micro injuries but the body doesn't recover. So then it starts to develop an injury. So most adults that's tendonitis. In kids it's different. We see more bone related problems in kids, or even stress fractures or problems with the growth plate. They get inflamed. So it's a similar process, it's just it presents itself a little differently. So overuse or the overuse injuries is what we by far are seeing more commonly and the studies would show it's up 800% right now.
Speaker 3:And is that because their bones are still growing? Is that the reason? Are their bones softer?
Speaker 1:That's right, it is, and so when you think about the weakest link, if you will, and you look at between the muscles and the tendon and the bone, the weakest link is really the growth plate. It's actually a soft cartilage and so it is just a softer tissue, and so that's why kids oftentimes don't have tendonitis. They have what we call apophysitis, or inflammation of the growth plate. And that's by far more common in what we see, right, right?
Speaker 2:Well, probably like seven, eight, nine years ago I tore my hamstring really badly and I was doing a lot of physical therapy at the Carol Clinic and I was so shocked of the amount of young kids that were in their high schoolers, football players, highland Bells all the athletes were in there doing rehab as well with me and I just I really was so shocked Like I couldn't understand at that time, because my kids were a lot younger why that many kids were in there getting rehab.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, I totally agree and you've got to continue. You know, right now I saw I'd say in the last two weeks I've seen two or three Bells that had some overuse injuries or, I'm sorry, future Bells. So they're in their middle school right now and we have to start talking about what are your goals, you know, and they have a summer filled with intensives and you know training. And I said, well, what are your goals? And they have a summer filled with intensives and training. And I said, well, what are your goals? Well, they'll say, well, my goals are to make the bells next year.
Speaker 1:And I said, okay, well, you've got to take care of your body, because come October, november, before your December tryouts, is when your body is going to start to shut down and that's when you're going to have to really figure out what your goals are, give your body a rest and just try to find that balance throughout the summertime. And if you set your goal, you can be more realistic about how to achieve it. You know what I'm saying. It's kind of one of those things that we never viewed our kids as being collegiate athletes. We just want them to be athletes. If they're collegiate athletes, well, that's a bonus, but that was never our goals and what we did, and so we have to reassess that.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean just going back to the bells for a minute.
Speaker 3:The human body is not designed to kick up to your ear right or jump into the splits on the field, like gymnastics, the same thing Like those are tough on your body right.
Speaker 2:Those are unnatural movements and not normal, right?
Speaker 1:I'll tell you you're really hitting a. You know you're kind of poking a bear with that comment because I get really frustrated with you know that may be one of the largest areas of frustration for me is you know there are so many kids that dedicate so many hours to something like the bells, and you know injuries, hamstrings. I mean your body is not meant to do as many high kicks as they're doing, but they're classes. There's a high kick class and then these kids and the moms are told well, if you don't do this class, you are not likely to be on the bells. And they perceive it and they recognize it. And then they think well, this is what we have to do to get on the bells. And that's just one of many examples.
Speaker 1:But I'll tell you, for some reason the bells seem to be the most stressful, not only from a physical state, like the recurrent nature of kicking your leg and going up and down. I mean the emotional toll that it is on the family when you work up. Let's just say, $20,000, $30,000 a year of investment, the 15 hours a week all for one tryout. It's crazy, yeah. And imagine if they don't make it.
Speaker 3:I mean, what does that do to a freshman female? Yeah, it's devastating for a lot of them, hey, Park City's families.
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Speaker 3:I have a question for you as a parent on that. So my son's home for four months this summer, right, he has a long summer from college and it was just freshman year, just like Martha's daughter, and he's running about 42 miles a week on the cross country and track team. So now it's summer and he'll have to go back in August to train. So my question to you is I want to push him so he doesn't get out of shape, but I don't want to push him too hard. Do you think it's reasonable to say, hey, run three times a week?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think being very strategic is really important, particularly, I mean, your son is a collegiate runner and running quite a bit. You know I like the strategy of an off-season, so you know, can you run? Yeah, you can run, but give your body a break and do some cross-training. You know it's a great opportunity to do. You know many runners don't like to bike or swim but, their bodies need a break.
Speaker 1:And so can you decrease your running by 20% over the summer but increase your cardio in another area? And the answer is yes, and that's what you should do. And so you can look at the entire let's just say you've got 10 weeks of summer is to take a runner and say, okay, well, let's give your body a break, but let's not lose the running habit? Maybe you decrease your mileage by 20% per week, but you add it in another direction and you do that for the month of June. Well then, maybe during the month of July you switch it a little bit, you start to increase your running back. You've given your body a break. Maybe you go to 40% of your weekly mileage, but you continue with your swimming, biking or other form of cardio.
Speaker 1:And let's not forget, for runners boy, they can be really stiff. Things like Pilates and yoga can be really valuable for them too, and another great source of cardio and to get their body in shape. So you know, to me it's a concept of cross training. You want to be hard on them, you don't want them to just kind of sit around and get deconditioned over the summer, but maybe there's a way in which they can kind of transition and do something else for fun.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's great advice, Well as we all know, in Texas we are so obsessed with football and I spent a lot of time last football season on the sidelines doing some reporting and just being right there. I saw so many injuries happen, I saw concussions and all the things. But what I find interesting is we're pushing and pushing for our kids to play football but only a very small percentage goes on to play in college and then only 1% goes on to play NFL. So why are we pushing so hard to play football?
Speaker 2:Well because we like it.
Speaker 3:We do love it and we like it as parents.
Speaker 1:We like it as spectators and our kids like it, and you know it's a form of entertainment, it's something for us to do on a Friday night and you know what it's. Again, our kids like it and we like it. So it's like synergistic it benefits us all. I think some of the concept you know football. Football is a Texas thing and you know, I think that we all want our kids to play football and we want them to be active and they want to play football. You know it is really a low, low rate of those that will end up being collegiate or even NFL.
Speaker 1:But there are really valuable parts about being a team and committing and dedicating and balancing life. I mean, you know, even just being an athlete, you have to commit so many hours but you have to balance that with your schoolwork, your family time, your social. I mean there are a lot of benefits that I think will outweigh that. I think you know, one of the comments I get from parents more than any other is well, my kids just like it. Like, my kids want to play more sports and run and they want to play more games and they want to play more tournaments. So I feel like it's okay, they're being active and I would really give the analogy of your kids also want to eat candy every night for dinner, but that doesn't make it the right thing to do. You have to control, because anything in excess of volume is too much.
Speaker 2:That's a really good analogy.
Speaker 3:But I was just going to argue this point for a minute. I understand where this drive from the parents come from because you said it at the beginning it is about sports, aren't just about sports, it's about leadership, it's about being a part of a team. I mean, that's what always interested me in sports for my kid or for myself was it's about participating in a unit and doing it together. You know you can do that and still be reasonable, right, you can still get all those benefits and not push your kids too hard.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean all cards on the table. The benefits to sports by far outweigh anything that we're talking about today. I mean you know the sense of leadership, the sense of commitment. We know that. You know drug and alcohol use is decreasing in athletes that play both at the high school and collegiate level.
Speaker 1:We know teenage pregnancy is less. We know grades are better. We know, all in all, there are so many positive aspects of being an athlete in high school and at the collegiate level, so I don't want to discount any of those, but I just think we need to do it in moderation. And you know, high school is one thing, but you know, to me high schoolers are. I mean, I do see a lot of high schoolers that have abused their body. But you know, I really think that the big epidemic of youth sports is really that late elementary to middle school years, which is where we're really seeing the craziness go out of control, and that's when we're seeing a lot of things. We're seeing a lot of these injuries to the growth plate, acl injuries in kids that are, you know, before they've closed their growth plates.
Speaker 3:So what's the youngest age you've ever had come in like with a patient?
Speaker 1:With an ACL injury.
Speaker 3:Yeah, with any kind of injury like that from stress.
Speaker 1:Well, the youngest ACL injury that I've seen, that I've had to operate on, was seven. Wow, wow. That is so young to operate on was seven.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow, that is so young. You're telling me, yeah.
Speaker 1:And it really almost scares me when I see you know, my son is now 11, when I would see kids that he played football against in my office with an ACL injury, and I'm thinking my 10-year-old. I can't imagine anyone having an ACL injury and needing a surgery for that.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it is and it's increasing, and it's that it's also baseball throwers.
Speaker 2:You know baseball throwers, oh their arms, yeah Gymnast I mean baseball.
Speaker 1:You know damage to the cartilage, you know is a big deal. We know throwing programs, you know a lot. You know what happens is the good kids are the ones that get abused. They get on multiple teams, they get to play up, they play more than other kids. Those are the ones that really get the. You know the bad cartilage problems, you know. Or even that ligamentous there's a little bit of a different type of Tommy John injury that they have for those baseball parents that are from kids. But you know, baseball gymnast, I'm seeing more and more lacrosse players with overuse injuries. Basketball, I mean it's across the board right now.
Speaker 2:Well, I watched a video of one of your presentations that you did recently and what I found interesting was you were talking about this whole concept of year-round sports, like you're doing lacrosse and then then it ends, and then you get on your travel team and you just keep going, so it's 12 months out of the year. Tell us about your thoughts on doing that as well as taking a break from that, because a lot of us feel that pressure that if you want to get good, you have to keep going year-round.
Speaker 1:If you want to get good, you have to keep going year round. Yeah, and I think that's a misconception globally. And why this happens, I don't know. I really think we're the drivers. I don't think it's the clubs or the coaches, I think it's the parents. I think the parents yearn for year round. I think we have this sense that we want to keep our kids active and we want to do it and we want to keep our kids doing things and if they love basketball, we're going to keep them in basketball.
Speaker 1:To me, the concept is really sports specialization. So there's a couple rules of thumb here. Number one we don't recommend anybody choosing one sport until the age of 14. Now I will say that I would push it as long as I can, but definitely before the age of 14, uh, you should not train, including competitions, more hours per week in a competitive sport than your age, right? If you're 10 years old, 10 hours a week of competitive training and that's it. Um, for any sport. You should play eight months, take four months off. Now I'll say they don't have to be consecutive. So you take December off, two months in the summer, so generally want to take four months off of any sport and you never want to play more than two organized sports at a time.
Speaker 3:So now just a question. So if you're in your 50s, does that mean I'm supposed to run Like 55 hours a?
Speaker 1:week or whatever.
Speaker 3:No, yeah I was like 10, 10, 14, oh, 50, 50 At one time.
Speaker 1:It needs to like inversely start to go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, please.
Speaker 1:You know, the other concept that I think is really important Is this rule called a 70-30 rule, where 70% of the time you should train, rule where 70% of the time you should train for your sport, 30% of the time you should condition for your sport.
Speaker 1:So if you're going to play let's just say you're a runner, okay, or swimmers is a great example right, you should spend 70% of the time swimming, 30% of the time doing Grandland workouts to help you swim, Okay. And so the 70-30 balance for, you know, my daughter, who's a soccer player, to help you swim. And so the 70-30 balance for my daughter, who's a soccer player. They just want her to play soccer and skills and more soccer and more skills. And I want her to play soccer 70% of the time and I want her to do injury prevention 30% of the time, which is really hip core strength performance training, and so a 70-30 balance is also really important. And that's another really key concept that you should think about when you're trying to figure out what to do with you know, what to do with your kid and family planning and all of your kids. How to balance it all when you kind of get into that, that craziness where you don't know how to control it.
Speaker 2:Well, another thing that I saw that you talked about was this whole concept of off campus, like when kids are trying to substitute their off-campus time for physical education at the school. The tradeoff is kind of strange. I think you have to prove 15 hours that you're doing off-campus to compensate for what you would do on campus, which seems a little odd to me.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I think this is a bigger problem problem than Park City, and it's something I have a professional interest in and you know, I just finished spending a year doing a lot of advocacy work for orthopedic surgeons in Texas for the TOA, and so my interest is now in looking at advocacy for youth sports. And so how do we lean on the UIL that really advises us and the athletic trainers how to balance what we ask our kids to do in school? So, like you said, if you do off-campus which is generally good and healthy 15 hours sounds absolutely ridiculous. Or the fact that my daughter does two hours of soccer every single day and they run and she conditions and she plays on the weekend yeah, she's still got to do so much athletics at school too. I mean, enough is enough. And how do we make a better strategic plan?
Speaker 1:The only counter argument to that is for all of us parents that are in the craziness of this world. There are equal amount of parents that are in this very not active. They don't get enough exercise, they need to get out more, they need to get more sunlight, they need to get more exercises, and so it's a big pendulum. We tend to be more on that crazy athletic side in the park cities, but there's a lot of kids that don't have any activity too. So it is definitely a balance that we should be knowledgeable of as well. But there are reasons for some of those rules.
Speaker 3:Well, and you said in one of your talks the NCL one that the cultural influence is affecting the health of our children. When you say cultural, do you mean the parental units? Is that what we're talking about, or is there something greater than that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean culturally is the problem. I mean, you know, and it is.
Speaker 3:Like.
Speaker 1:American culture. I do think a part of it is the American culture. I mean, I think we are we. You know, our access to information, our access to data, our access to you know, our kids, the knowledge, the teams All of that has created us to want to grow our families a lot faster and to put a very, you know, larger sense of you, sense of importance and how to get to college, and we now use numbers and data and value and it becomes more important. I mean I didn't even think about going into what college I was going to until my junior year in high school and now my daughter's in eighth grade and we've got to start talking to a counselor right now about strategically figuring out what to do, and I'm like this is crazy now about strategically figuring out what to do, and I'm like this is crazy, yeah, but parents are definitely the cultural problem and we all I shouldn't say parents we are a bit of the problem and we like it, we enjoy it.
Speaker 1:I was moderating a sports medicine symposium once and we had owners of a bunch of club sports up on the moderating stand and I said why can't you guys do better for advocating for your athletes by giving them at least three months off?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and one owner I mean nameless, you know, but very reputable volleyball club. He says I get it, but if I don't, you know, if I take three months off, that's 25% of my overall revenue. And parents want their kids doing something and so if I'm not bringing them here doing volleyball, they will take their kids to other teams. They will do something different. It is definitely everybody wants the. We want the year-round sports as much as anyone, particularly if you view your kid as one of the top athletes that need to be a part of one of those teams.
Speaker 3:But they could still do the 70-30 rule that you talked about right, they could.
Speaker 1:And that's been part of our messages to the clubs is to try to implement saying you know, you can still go to volleyball. Let's say but.
Speaker 3:We're doing strength training.
Speaker 1:Maybe you do strength training, maybe you do yoga, maybe you do something else instead of the up and down, the abuse of the knees, and maybe just do hip and core strengthening, and I think a lot of them are really doing that as well, but to them it's just volleyball. But I do think a lot of clubs are going to, and I've talked to a lot of clubs in town that are really starting to ask us hey, can you help, come into our system, show us what we need to do to protect our athletes long term.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that this is where we're all going with. This is, how do we change people's perception and get them to jump on board with this whole? You know, taking a little bit of time off, maybe, not doing the rigorous year round schedules.
Speaker 1:Well, I think we have to drive it. You know we have to. You know when your kid is going to join a club volleyball club, soccer or equivalent team, you need to say what injury prevention mechanisms do you have in place. When you join a baseball team, you ask what pitch counts you have in place. When are you going to? You know how is my son going to develop as a pitcher, because form is so important to pitching and throwing injuries. You know how is my son going to develop as a pitcher, because form is so important to pitching and throwing injuries. You know our community. You know when it comes to bells or something along those lines, I mean we as parents need to tell them.
Speaker 1:This is not right. We cannot do this. I'm not going to let my kid do three hours of high kick class a week. I mean we have to start, you know, coming together because they're bodies and, honestly, if you saw that presentation, you know I put x-rays of what the growth plate and the bone looks like when it has this overuse and when you see that hamstring and the irregularity of the development of the bone on the pelvis from the hamstring, overuse, injuries that we see in Bells, I mean, as a parent, you'd be like, oh my gosh, is that what's going on? Wow?
Speaker 1:And we've got to demand it and we have to have a higher sense of it. And that doesn't mean they can't train, that doesn't mean we won't pay the teachers to teach us how to do it. Well, we just have to do it in a more healthy way. Just have to do it in a more healthy way. And I think we have to as a community, whether in the park, cities or anywhere, we just have to all come together and agree how we're going to do it strategically. But it needs to be per sport, because they're all different. You almost have to look at them all a little different. I mean, you know you're saying your son's a runner. I mean runners are. You know runners are. You know they have their problems too.
Speaker 3:I mean we see a lot of them, you know, august.
Speaker 1:September we just get a spike in stress fractures that we see in runners, and so you know, runners really need a better balance of nutrition and sleep and recovery and as well as controlling the running, you know, as they're training up for a season, so everyone has to do a little differently.
Speaker 3:Well, this has been such valuable information.
Speaker 2:Don't you agree, martha? Absolutely. I was sitting here thinking we're running out of time right now, so I feel like we need to do a second part to this because there's so much more to talk about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but thank you so much for being on the show. Such great advice and I don't know we'll post things. Where can people find you?
Speaker 1:Well, most people somehow find a way to find me find you. Well, most people somehow find a way to find me, but they stalk you. No, not at all. I, you know I love what I do. I'm honored to be involved in many kids and youth health and talking to families and parents. You know, if you find me, this is my favorite topic to talk about, and always happy to chat or you want to talk strategy. You know I love to do it.
Speaker 1:Obviously, working at Scottish Rite, you know we have a focus on young athletes, and not only do we really have a very high sense of the excellent care that we give, we're doing research on all of this, and so we have published on, you know, running injury prevention. We have published on ACL prevention. We have published on looking at, you know, coping with our young athletes during COVID. So we're really interested in learning as much as we can, and so I really encourage anyone that would be willing to kind of help us learn more to reach out to us and to look us up and be a part of something that we can learn from.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for being here today. I mean, this has been such a wealth of information.
Speaker 3:So that's been another episode of the Bubble Lounge. I'm Nellie Sciutto.
Speaker 2:And I'm Martha Jackson, and we'll catch you next time.