Home » Health & Safety Channel » General Health & Safety

General Health & Safety

Youth Sports Liability Waivers: Protecting Towns At The Expense of Our Children’s Safety?

Before every sports season, parents all across the countries are asked to sign forms holding the sports program in which their child will be participating harmless and releasing the program from liability should he be injured. No ifs ands or buts.  The parent or guardian of a child using a program or town’s facilities must sign a waiver.  Such forms are typical for all camp programs; sports clinics and sporting events organized by independent groups, such as the baseball, soccer and football organizations using town fields.

Sports Benefit Girls In Many Ways

Extensive research shows that physical activity and sport can enhance the mental, psychological and spiritual health of American girls and young women. The bottom line is that while sports are not the magic potion they do help girls get through the trials of adolescence.

Well-Designed Resistance Training Program Can Help Youth Athletes Avoid Injuries, Obesity and Diabetes

When part of an appropriately designed exercise and nutrition program, resistance training can help battle two of the growing youth health epidemics: obesity and type 2 diabetes. In addition, a well designed resistance training program may help in preventing sport- and recreation-related injuries among youth athletes.

Health and Safety Tips for Your Family's Summer Vacation

Summer brings warm sunny days and opportunities galore for outdoor activities. But bee stings, sunburn, boating accidents and an increased risk of food poisoning can all subtract from the fun. To help keep such threats at bay, physicians and scientists associated with the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) have updated their list of Health and Safety Tips for Your Summer Vacation.

Part 2: Preventing Youth Sport Injuries

Here again are the four areas of conditioning/training for injury prevention that I feel are often neglected by many youth sports programs.

Functional Sports-Specific Training

Part 1: Preventing Youth Sport Injuries

In my article The Rise in Youth Sports Injuries, I discussed how prevalent youth sports injuries have become and listed several articles as reference. In this post, I would like to offer some basic principles of injury prevention by directing you toward articles that detail important pieces of this information. Additionally, in Part 2, I will take this a step further by encouraging conditioning/training in four other areas that are often neglected. The time spent will be well worth the effort.

The Rise in Youth Sports Injuries

In my article, Specializing in Youth Sports, Good or Bad, I touched on the current increase in injuries to young competitors playing sports. Just the fact that the sheer number of young athletes participating has gone up over the last several decades, would automatically cause an upswing in the number of young sports enthusiasts having to seek medical attention. There is just an inherent physical risk in competitive sports that cannot be denied.

Stretching, Warm Ups and Cool Downs Prevent Youth Sports Injuries

While not all youth sports injuries are preventable, sport specific strength and conditioning training and adequate rest between games go a long way in preventing both serious and minor injuries. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) recommends that children and adolescents include fitness exercises during each training session to develop specific skills required for that sport. While fitness activities may be geared towards the strength, endurance and flexibility requirements of that sport, they should not exclude other components of a well-rounded general fitness program.

Syndicate content