Year Round Sport – A recipe for disaster?
Here at Holmfirth Town Juniors we promote multi-sport training and encourage the kids to participate in as wide a variety of activities as possible.
Unless your child is involved in early specialisation sports such as gymnastics and diving, where competitors generally peak during their teenage years, then you should be doing everything in your power to ensure your child experiences a wide variety of sports during their early years.
Latest research shows that children who participated in a number of different sports during their formative years, often overtake those that specialised early in terms of their performance. Sport is a lifelong journey and it may take until the teenage years for the multi sport athlete to overtake the single sport athlete, but our children should be entering into sport for lifelong enjoyment and not short term gains.
Time needs to be spent developing basic coordination, through running, jumping, hopping, landing, falling, skipping, catching and kicking. If a child only does one sport it is highly unlikely that enough attention will be paid or be able to cater for all of these movements.
The old adage still remains here that variety is the spice of life!