Abstract
Sport specialization is a growing trend in youth athletes and may contribute to increased injury risk. The neuromuscular deficits that often manifest during maturation in young, female athletes may be exacerbated in athletes who specialize in a single sport. The purpose of this study was to investigate if sport specialization is associated with increased lower extremity biomechanical deficits pre- to post-puberty in adolescent female athletes. Seventy-nine sport-specialized female adolescent (Mean ± SD age = 13.4 ± 1.8 years) basketball, soccer, and volleyball athletes were identified and matched with seventy-nine multi-sport (soccer, basketball, and volleyball) female athletes from a database of 1,116 female adolescent basketball, soccer, and volleyball athletes who were enrolled in one of two large prospective, longitudinal studies. The athletes were assessed over two visits (Mean ± SD time = 724.5 ± 388.7 days) in which they were classified as pre-pubertal and post-pubertal, respectively. Separate 2 × 2 analyses of covariance were used to compare sport-specialized and multi-sport groups and dominant/non-dominant limbs with respect to pubertal changes in peak knee sagittal, frontal, and transverse plane joint angular measures and moments of force recorded while performing a drop vertical jump task. The sport-specialized group were found to exhibit significantly larger post-pubertal increases in peak knee abduction angle (p = 0.005) and knee abduction moment (p = 0.006), as well as a smaller increase in peak knee extensor moment (p = 0.032) during landing when compared to the multi-sport group. These biomechanical changes are indicative of potentially compromised neuromuscular control that may increase injury risk pre- to post-puberty in sport-specialized female athletes. Consideration of maturation status may be an important factor in assessing the injury risk profiles of adolescent athletes who specialize in sport.
Highlights
Sport specialization, or a year- or near year-round commitment to one sport at the exclusion of others [1], is becoming increasingly prevalent among pre-adolescent and adolescent athletes [2]
The aim of the present study was to examine the influence of sport specialization on knee injury risk biomechanics across puberty
The main finding of our study showed that sportspecialized female athletes exhibited knee kinematic and kinetic changes pre- to post-puberty that may increase risk for injury when compared to multi-sport female athletes [29]
Summary
A year- or near year-round commitment to one sport at the exclusion of others [1], is becoming increasingly prevalent among pre-adolescent and adolescent athletes [2] This trend may be driven by a number of factors, including an overall decrease in unstructured physical activity (i.e., “free play”), an increase in structured activity among youth [3], and an increased pressure on youth athletes to excel in sport [4]. The latter of these is underscored by the potential economic benefit of sport success [e.g., college scholarships, elite achievement, or high professional sports salaries [5, 6]] and the theoretical competitive advantage that deliberate practice might give youth athletes. Given the nearly 10-fold increase in female sports participation since the inception of Title IX [12], young female athletes may be specializing in sport at an increasing rate [2, 13, 14]
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