Health & Safety

Spending time outdoors is fun, even in the cold of winter. But, just as in warmer weather, special precautions need to be taken when exercising in cold weather to avoid dehydration, hypothermia, and frostbite. Here are some things to consider if you or your children are playing sports in the cold.

As any parent of a competitive age-group swimmer knows, an indoor pool tends to be a very hot and humid place even at the best of times. Pack in all the competitors and spectators at a day-long meet and the temperatures soar, with athletes in or around the pool losing fluids at a high rate.  Practices for competitive swimmers also tend to last a long time, during which athletes not only burn a lot of calories but lose a lot of water and electrolytes.

Regular physical activity in children and adolescents promotes health and fitness. Compared to those who are inactive, physically active youth have higher levels of cardiorespiratory fitness and stronger muscles. They also typically have lower body fatness. Their bones are stronger, and they may have reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Parents who believe that their kids are getting enough physical exercise just from playing organized sports may be in for a surprise.  A new study finds that, though participation in youth sports contributes to overall physical activity, fewer than one fourth of youth soccer, baseball and softball players studied obtained the sixty minutes a day of moderate to vigorous physical exercise (MVPA) during sports practices that U.S. guidelines recommend.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the less children exercise the more at risk they are at risk of obesity, but a new study finds that the most overweight and obese children are actually members of ethnic groups that are some of the most active.

With the support of 40 sports and health organizations, including MomsTeam.com, the National Athletic Trainers' Association (NATA) has issued a C+ grade on youth sports safety for 2010, reporting that 48 young athletes died since the beginning of the year, with sudden cardiac arrest accounting for nearly half of those deaths, brain injury (concussion) for three, heat illness three, and exertional sickling (a result of sickle cell trait) one. Approximately 8,000 children are treated in emergency rooms each day for sports-related injuries. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, high school athletes suffer 2 million injuries, 500,000 doctor visits and 30,000 hospitalizations each year.

Two-time Olympic track cyclist and mom, Erin Mirabella, talks about her experience with cross-training and offers advice to parents on helping their child find the right sport or cross-training regimen for them.

Parents and coaches can help prevent common volleyball injuries by promoting proper warm-up, stretching and strengthening exercises, as well as paying close attention to the proper techniques, footwear, braces and pads to play volleyball safely.

High school girls who suffer concussions in sports do not report a greater number of symptoms, take longer for their symptoms to clear, or return to play later than males, says a surprising new study.  But while the severity and outcome of concussions, as measured in the time symptoms take to clear and for athletes to return to play, do not vary by gender, the type of symptoms reported by girls are more subtle and easily missed than those boys report, say the new authors of the study published in the Journal of Athletic Training.