Performance Enhancement in Youth Sports

The term ‘performance-enhancement’ often has negative connotations referring to drugs or substances that many of our favorite athletes get caught using. But when it comes to young athletes, the term ‘performance-enhancement’ refers to tools and techniques that can protect against injury and improve gameplay to help young athletes reach their goals. 

Experts from our Sports Medicine Center, like primary care sports medicine physician Gregory Walker, MD, are constantly researching and testing ways to help young athletes improve their performance. One important area Dr. Walker has been studying is how non-contact ACL injuries are linked to poor neuromuscular control and how the nerves and muscles interact. Along with our sports medicine team, Dr. Walker explains how this research and strategies are helping young athletes avoid injury and perform better. 

Performance enhancement and ACL injury

A non-contact ACL injury study conducted at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center serves as a great model, says Dr. Walker. Researchers chose young female athletes as the study subjects, because according to data, that group is at higher risk of suffering an ACL injury. 

Researchers were looking to determine the effects of neuromuscular training on injury risk predictors and performance. In other words, they wanted to see if reteaching proper movement techniques would enhance the athletes’ performance. And if that was the case, they hypothesized that it would lower the risk of injury. 

The female athletes were asked to participate in sports performance training, including plyometrics (exercises that involve rapid, explosive movements that alternate between muscle contraction and stretching), core strengthening and balance, resistance training and speed training. By the end of the study, the athletes had improved their performance in every category and 3D motion analysis showed an increased range of motion when bending and straightening the knee. Additionally, the training program helped decrease the amount of twisting force being generated on the knee by the athletes’ movements, effectively reducing the risk of ACL injury. 

“When we have really good neuromuscular skill patterns, we’re actually going to train better,” says Dr. Walker. “And all of that training we do will transform into better performance. Interestingly, the study found that as performance increased, the risk for injury decreased.” 

Performance enhancement at Children’s Colorado

So, if improving performance can produce such incredible results, why isn’t the medical community talking more about it? 

“In the pediatric realm, our job is to keep kids safe, healthy and injury free,” says Dr. Walker. “The medical community, specifically sports medicine, has been primarily interested in injury prevention, which is extremely important. However, as we begin to learn more about the links between injury prevention and performance, I hope we can start to discuss performance more.” 

That’s because kids are likely to be more enthusiastic about injury prevention when it’s linked with ways to improve their performance. 

“Kids want to hear, ‘Hey, if you do this, you’re going to play better,’” says Dr. Walker. “It automatically becomes more engaging for them.” 

This is why our Sports Medicine Center is working to incorporate performance enhancement into its injury risk reduction program at the hospital and in the community. 

“We know there are ways to improve neuromuscular skill patterns and body movements,” he says. “I see these two things as the big buckets kids can work on, and we can help by teaching them things like the proper way to lift and squat, and good running form.” 

Incorporating these techniques early could help more young athletes reach their goals without having to endure injury along the way.