NEWS

MomsTeam.com: Balance training helps all athletics for kids

Print

Here’s the best content this week from our friends at MomsTeam.com, a site devoted to health and safety in youth sports:

* Balancing training is very important in all sports because all athletic movement relies on the body’s ability to stay centered, producing the maximal potential for movement, whether it is to sprint down the soccer or football field or pulling up for a 20-foot jump shot on the basketball court. Too often balance training programs are ineffective. It isn’t because an athlete is not doing the exercises, but more often because they are doing the exercises wrong. Physical therapist Keith Cronin, DPT lists the rules athletes need to follow in order for the success achieved during training to translate into success on the field.

* The use of muscle-enhancing behaviors among middle and high school boys and girls — including such unhealthy behaviors as using protein powders or shakes, steroids, and other muscle-enhancing substances – is substantially higher than previously reported, a new study finds.

  * Although pediatric primary care and emergency medicine providers regularly treat concussions, many admit to lacking the training or tools needed to diagnose and manage concussed patients, a new study finds.
* Good sideline behavior by parents sets the right example for your children. Here are five tips from MomsTeam’s Brooke de Lench on ways parents can demonstrate good sportsmanship on the sidelines.

* It was a very busy seven days for MomsTeam’s Founder and Publisher Brooke de Lench, including participation in the Aspen Institute football roundtable, a keynote address to a concussion conference in Austin, TX, and back to Boston in time to hear NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s talk at the Harvard School of Public Health. Pretty much all football, all concussions, all the time. But if there is anything Brooke has learned over the past 12 years of following the advances in knowledge of concussions, it is that an “all-of-the-above” strategy has the best chance of making the game safer.

– MomsTeam.com and NFL Evolution.