- May 10, 2016
From football to swimming, volleyball and cross country. A lot of students are participating in sports right now. It’s a busy time and while there are many benefits, obviously there are all sorts of dangers. Every year about 2 million high school athletes suffer injuries, and 30,000 of them are hospitalized because of those injuries. But there’s good news. Many of these sports injuries are preventable and we have the experts here to talk about that today, how to prevent them.
I’m joined now by three-time Olympic gold medalist and FIFA world cup participant Heather Mitts and Dr. Grant Garlick with the Florida Orthopaedic Institute. Guys. Good morning. So I said from football to swimming, I have four daughters, two of those swim. When they came to me last year, this spring, my ankle hurts, my ankle hurts. I’m like, I don’t know. How do you get hurt or injured in swimming, Heather? So we’ll start with you. What are kids maybe parents doing that are the mistakes we’re making that can prevent some of these injuries?
Yeah, I mean that’s the nice thing about this program, FIFA 11 plus. It shows you the ways to land when you’re jumping, to work on your balance, and just to how to become a little bit stronger and prevent those injuries from happening.
Dr. Grant, you know, you look at any ESPN site, anything like that, and they’re talking about seventh and eighth-grade athletes who are going to be primed. They’re already focusing on these kids. These kids haven’t even developed their muscles yet. All of a sudden we’re focusing how great they’re going to be here in four or five years. So what appearance, the mistake that they’re making pushing their kids, what can we do to sit there and say, Hey, let’s slow down a little bit. These kids aren’t even 13, 14 yet.
It’s exactly, you hit right on it. And this is part of the program that Heather’s involved in as well. As you said, there’s no muscle development. So a lot of the times where there’s overuse type of injuries with kids and they’re relying on more their ligament and bone structure rather than their muscle development. And that’s why this program is so important. It stresses muscle development over ligament and structure depending on ligament and structure.
Okay. So, Heather, you can talk about athletes and need young people are the things they can do. Maybe stretch, jump higher, jump right, do all these things correctly. But what do we do to say to parents this morning who are sort of pushing their kids out there and saying it but still be nice and saying it?
Um, just to, you know, obviously you when your kids go out there and do well and are involved in the sport, but you know, you want to make sure they’re out there and they’re safe. So warming up, finding ways to be able to prevent those injuries. I then got there and have fun on the field. Eating right as well?
Yeah, a website where people can go and find out more about this. Yeah. If you go to the Facebook page and look up the Sport Prevention, and that is where you can find everything from FIFI 11 plus program.
And Dr. Garlick, website where folks who do have an injury or something happens and all of a sudden, Hey, I got to go to that expert was on your show. That’s right at floridaortho.com. Dr. Garlick, Heather, thank you so much for joining us today. Obviously be smart as well.