Sports can teach your kids valuable life lessons and help them build their confidence. As a parent, you want your children to learn all they can from their participation in sports and other physical activities. That being said, Dr. Perry Herman, a sports injury medical specialist in Plainsboro, NJ, realizes that you also want to keep them safe from injury.
With tens of millions of children active in sports and other physical activities every year in the U.S., it’s not surprising that sports-related injuries are a concern. About 20 percent of these kids will experience an injury in any given year, and a quarter of these injuries will be considered serious. As one of the best chronic pain doctors in NJ, Dr. Herman’s Comprehensive Sports, Spine and Pain Management practice, would like to give you the following pointers to tell your kids to help them prevent injury.
1. Make Sure You Warm up Beforehand This is critical for preventing injury during whatever sport you’ll be playing.
Tell your children to start out with slower movements and then build their intensity until they get to the activity level they’ll be at when in game. You also want them to include sport-specific movements into their warm-up routine. This will help prepare their body for the types of actions that will be required of it, which should reduce the chance of injury and the chance of you having to search for pain management doctors in Plainsboro, NJ. pain management doctors in Plainsboro, NJ
2. Include Dynamic Stretches When many of us think of stretching before physical activity, standing in place and leaning forward and down to touch your toes is the type of stretch that comes to mind.
While this type of stretching certainly may have its place, you also want to integrate dynamic stretches into your routine. These are stretches in which you’re constantly in motion. They’re superior to the static type in that they can improve range of motion and blood flow in addition to the traditional static stretching benefit of literally stretching the muscles. This website has some examples of dynamic stretches your kid can incorporate into their pre-game stretching routine. This website
3. Exercises to Prevent ACL Injury Are Critical ACL stands for anterior cruciate ligament, and this is the connective tissue around the knee that holds the thigh bone and the shinbone together.
This type is especially important if you’re the proud parent of a daughter because girls are eight times as likely to get this type of injury compared to boys. With more than 200,000 cases of such injuries reported each year in the United States, you might want to make sure any of your children who are active in sports incorporate exercises that strengthen this tissue around the knee. The following website shows some excellent stretching exercises just for this problem: https://mydoctor.kaiserpermanente.org/ncal/promotions/#/aclinjuryprevention. Following this advice will prevent your child from having unnecessary pain and keep you from having to find a knee pain specialist in NJ.
https://mydoctor.kaiserpermanente.org/ncal/promotions/#/aclinjuryprevention
4. Cool Down Properly After Activity After being so careful to take steps to prepare for activity beforehand, make sure your kids don’t neglect cooling down afterward.
This is when some experts say static stretches may be best in order to help flexibility and muscles to recover quicker.
5. Build Your Strength in the Off-Season
You should advise your children to stay in shape during the off-season, so they’re starting out being less prone to injury. Have them focus on exercises that build functional strength such as push-ups, sit-ups, squats and lunges.
6. Remember to Have Fun
You should tell your kids not to overdo it when it comes to sports and other physical activity. Fun is supposed to be the point of the exercise. They can get injuries from too much exertion just as they can from insufficient warm up or preparation.
At our Comprehensive Sports, Spine and Pain Management practice, we want you and your entire family to have fun this spring and summer playing sports and engaging in other recreational activities. That being said, sports injuries are a fact of life that occasionally happen. If you find yourself in need of a knee pain specialist, back pain specialist or pain management doctors in Plainsboro, NJ, please contact our practice, and Dr. Herman will apply his non-surgical pain treatment expertise to get your loved one up and running again as soon as possible.
