PRESENTED BY : NURUL AIN BT MOHD AZMI

To have fun

To improve their skills
To learn new skills
To be with their friends
To make new friends
To succeed or win
To become physically fit
• Kids usually get the benefits they seek from sports
and more.
• Kids need attention and respect (in that order), but
they have few ways to get them.
• What is unique about sports is that they offer kids an
arena where they can earn attention and respect by
exerting their natural abilities.
• Kids are good at sports because sports are essentially
about speed, strength, coordination, vision, creativity,
and responsiveness-the necessary physical attributes
are the attributes of youth.
According to researchers at the Institute for the Study
of Youth Sports at Michigan State University, kids
who participate in organized sports do better in
school, have better interpersonal skills, are more team
oriented, and are generally healthier.

Participation in sports provides opportunities for

leadership and socialization, as well as the
development of skills for handling success and failure.
Moreover, when playing games, children learn how
rules work.
• They see how groups need rules to keep order, that
the individual must accept the rules for the good of
the group, that rules entail a consideration of the
rights of others.
• The President's Council on Physical Fitness and
Sports reports many developmental benefits of
participating in youth sports for girls, including
increased self-esteem and self-confidence, healthier
body image, significant experiences of competency
and success, as well as reduced risk of chronic disease.
Furthermore, female athletes "do better academically
and have lower school dropout rates than their
nonathletic counterparts.“

The Women's Sports Foundation lists many ways

that sports specifically benefit female athletes.

These include their being less likely to become

pregnant as teenagers, less likely to begin smoking,
more likely to quit smoking, more likely to do well in
science, and more likely to graduate from high school
and college than female nonathletes.
• Contemporary performance demands are so high in
track and field that athletes with average ability are
not going to succeed, even if the best training
methods are employed.

• This stresses the importance of correct selection

procedures for a particular event.

• Unfortunately the procedures are not always efficient

in our sports schools, reflected in a high drop-out rate
and studies showing that 50% of those accepted fail to
achieve the expected results.
In order to succeed it is important that all young
athletes train for an event they are best suited for.

This is achieved only when the performance

capacities and potential can be accurately
determined, based on the recently developed so called
model characteristics.
 The model characteristics are divided into three
categories:

General to all sporting events.

General to a particular group of events.
Specific to a particular event.
General to all sporting events is the morphological
model, as physique, height and weight are important
factors in several activities, particularly at record
breaking levels.

The height of an athlete is often an important factor

in the selection. However, coaches frequently prefer
shorter athletes because they are usually better
coordinated, learn the techniques faster and produce
better short term results than their tall counterparts.
Analysis of the physical development of young
athletes has shown that a particular physique
depends, besides morphological characteristics, also
on the activities performed during the developmental
years.

Body proportions can often be decisive in establishing

the work capacity of an athlete.

The relative upper body and leg length, for example,

is important in running events. Runners should
therefore have a short trunk and long legs.
An exact selection criterion must be applied to events
that require predominantly inherited physique and
functional characteristics.

Training brings here only limited improvement

because the changes to the genetic structure are
extremely restricted.

Talent for these events should be found from a large

mass, attempting to discover young athletes who have
a suitable genetic structure for a particular event.
The variety of track and field events sets different
demands to participants.

The tallest are the throwers, followed by the hurdlers,

high and long jumpers, sprinters and middle distance
runners.

 Long distance runners are the shortest. Particularly

important is to observe the development of height
and weight.
As far as the physique is concerned, lean and long
legged youngsters are best suited to middle distance
running, high and long jumping.

Tall, broad shouldered and muscular youngsters have

the makings of throwers and multiple event
exponents.
The second model, applicable to all events, is the
physical performance capacities model.

We discovered that the level of several physical

performance capacities stabilizes at a certain age.

This age was 13 years for speed and power and 14

years for absolute strength, endurance and flexibility.

The use of both methods obviously produces the

most reliable results.
Several specialists believe that the rate of
improvement is particularly important to predict the
performance potential of young athletes.

This has been confirmed by experimental studies,

showing that youngsters who made fast progress
during the first 18 months of training were most
successful also later.
Athletes, whose initial performance levels were only
average but who improved at a rapid rate, often
passed those with excellent initial levels.

 It is generally considered that the improvement rate

in speed and power events is good when it reaches
10.5 to 12.5% at the end of 18 months.
Stature (height) and body mass (weight) are the two
body dimensions most commonly used to monitor
growth.

Growth rates
The fastest rate of growth occurs in the first two years
when children grow about 5 inches (13 cm).
Growth then continues at a steady rate of 2.5 inches
(6 cm) per year until about the age of 11 in girls and 13
in boys, when the pubertal growth spurt begins.
The pubertal growth spurt lasts about 2 years and is
accompanied by sexual development (growth of pubic
hair, development of sex organs, deepening of the
voice in boys, and beginning of menstruation in girls).

Normal growth stops when the growing ends of the

bones fuse.

This usually occurs between the ages of 13 and 15 for

girls, and 14 and 17 for boys.
 Bone development
Bones develop from a cartilage growth plate, called
epiphysial plates, at each end of the bone shaft.

These growth plates divide the calcified head of the

bone (epiphysis) and the calcified shaft (diaphysis).

The bone lengthens as cartilage is calcified into bone

on the diaphysial border, thus lengthening the shaft.
At the same time, cartilage continues to grow on the
epiphysial border, so the epiphysial plates retain a
constant width of cartilage throughout.

 Growth ends when the plate eventually calcifies.

Muscles
Muscle mass increases steadily until puberty, at
which point boys show faster muscle growth.
 Fat
• The hormonal changes at puberty also affect body
composition in terms of fat.
• At birth, both boys and girls have around 10 to 12%
body fat.
• Pre-puberty, both girls and boys still have a similar 16-
18% body fat.
• Post-puberty, girls have around 25% body fat due to
high serum oestrogen, which causes the hips to widen
and extra fat to be stored in the same area.
• Post-puberty, boys have 12 to 14% body fat.
Most athletic females, post-puberty, tend to keep
body fat at around 18% (Wilmore & Costill, 1994).

Any lower than 12% body fat for females can be

considered unhealthy in terms of maintaining bone
density and disrupting hormone levels, which may
increase the risk of stress fractures.
Coaches need to make female athletes aware that
until they are 19, they will steadily gain in muscle and
so will naturally be gaining weight and that by eating
the right kinds of foods is the way to avoid unwanted
weight gain.
 Potential growth related injuries

The change in female body shape during the growth

spurt has its particular injury risks.

 The hips widen, placing the femur at a greater

inward angle.

During running or walking, this increased femur

angle leads to greater inward rotation at the knee and
foot.
This rotation can result in an injury called
chrondomalacia patella, which occurs when the knee-
cap does not run smoothly over the knee joint and
pain is caused at the front of the knee.

Exercise
Exercise will neither stunt nor promote growth in
terms of height but it does thicken the bones by
increasing mineral deposits (Wilmore & Costill, 1994).
A large number of young athletes train for
competitive sport before puberty.

A modern female can begin to exhibit the physical

changes associated with puberty as ages as young as
eight years old, or as old as 13.

 The modern age for the onset of male puberty ranges

from 10 years of age to 14 years.
Puberty is a genetically determined process for every
individual; it is the period when the body grows faster
than at any other time in a person's life, other than
during infancy.

 Puberty may last between 18 months and four years

or more.
• During puberty, as the bones grow, the stresses on
both the bone structure and the connective tissue in
the related joints can become significant. The long
bones of the body, particularly the tibia and fibula
(lower leg), femur (thigh), and the humerus (upper
arm), have growth plates located at the epiphysis, a
segment located near the end of each of these bones.

• The growth plate is fundamental to the healthy and

orderly growth of the bone to maturity
Strength training for young people must be
approached with caution.

For children who have not yet reached puberty, any

form of weight training is dangerous to the child's
long-term musculoskeletal health.

Focused stretching and flexibility exercises will

benefit all active persons of any age; the introduction
of resistance and weight training is of little benefit to
a child.
Training to develop maximum strength is a
dangerous process for a pubescent athlete.

Overload resistance training, plyometrics jump

programs, intense resistance running, or any
repetitive weight-bearing training activity carries with
it significant structural risks.
Female Gymnasts
On average, young female athletes in most sports are
taller than individuals in the non-athletic population.

For example, female basketball players, volleyball

players, tennis players, rowers, and swimmers are
taller than average, from the 10th year of life onwards.
However, female figure skaters, ballet dancers, and
gymnasts are usually shorter than the average female
during childhood and early adolescence.

In addition, today’s female gymnasts are actually

shorter, compared with the fabled gymnasts of 20
years ago.
Thus, female gymnasts are not underweight for their
heights, but they are unusually small in stature,
compared with both other athletes and the general
population.

Does the diminutive size of gymnasts increase their

risk of injury?

Does their reduced size mean that their skeletal

systems are also less well-developed, compared with
female athletes in other sports?
Gymnasts also tend to reach menarche later than
young women in the general population, and later
than young females in other sports.

To summaries, female gymnasts tend to be short,

they begin to menstruate later than usual, and their
skeletons are rather non-robust.
For example, researchers from Deakin University in
Australia and Western Washington University in the
United States.

This group found that adolescent-female-gymnasts’

skeletal systems matured at decreased rates during
periods of regular gymnastics training, but then began
to catch up during periods of reduced training or else
retirement, suggesting that something about
gymnastics training was affecting growth and
maturation.
The Deakin-Washington researchers found that the
greater the number of years of gymnastic training, the
greater the reduction in growth; they also found that
gymnasts tended to have more problems with their
spinal growth, compared with elongation of the bones
in the arms and legs.
 Sports are for fun, but they also
offer benefits and lessons that carry
over into all aspects of life.
 That’s all from me…

thank you for listening

and your attention..
Reference…
• The Young Athlete: A Sports Doctor's Complete
Guide for Parents, By Jordan D. Metzl, M.D., Carol
Shookhoff, Ph.D.
• Strength Training for Young Athletes
By William J. Kraemer, Ph.D. & Steven J. Fleck, Ph.D.
• Endurance in young athletes: it can be trained,
A D G Baxter-Jones, N Maffulli.
• SELECTION OF YOUNG ATHLETES, By Rein Aule,
Jaan Loko.