Age, Not Specialization, Predictive of Injury

Sports specialization and physical activity levels don’t predict athletic movement quality or injury risk, a new study finds. But age does.

While early sports specialization has been linked to higher injury risk, the researchers found that age affected movement quality and neuromuscular balance more.

In the study, “Age Is More Predictive of Safe Movement Patterns Than Are Physical Activity or Sports Specialization: A Prospective Motion Analysis Study of Young Athletes,” published online on April 29, 2021 in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, they analyzed data on quality of physical movement, quantity of physical activity, and degree of sports specialization in a cohort of 147 healthy, active children and adolescents between the ages of 10 and 18 years.

All the participants completed the Hospital for Special Surgery Pediatric Functional Activity Brief Scale to assess quantity of physical activity, and the Jayanthi scale to measure degree of sports specialization (high, score of 2 or 3; low score of 0 or 1).

The researchers assessed the children’s movement quality using motion analysis during 5 repetitions of 4 different jumping and squatting motions. The maximum score per participant was 100.

Overall, those participants who were highly specialized had better movement quality than those with low sports specialization (27.6 ± 14.0 vs. 19.8 ± 10.1; p < .01).

The children who were highly specialized had higher activity levels (24.6 ± 5.9 vs. 18.1 ± 6.9; p < .001). And movement quality mostly correlated with physical activity (r = 0.335; p < .001).

In this study, physical activity, hours of organized sports activity, hours of free, unorganized physical activity; and specialization level were not significant predictors of movement quality when controlling age.

Age alone predicted 24.2% of the differences in movement quality score (R²= 0.242; B = 3.0; p < .001).

“Although all participants displayed movement patterns that were associated with high risk for injury, overall movement quality improved with advancing chronological age,” the researchers wrote.

“All young athletes should ensure that neuromuscular training accompanies sport-specific training to reduce risk of injury.”