Health & Safety

New research in adolescents demonstrates that a protein-rich breakfast, containing eggs, improves appetite control and additional research shows that a higher protein diet may help obese adolescents manage weight.

Inadequate warm-up is one often overlooked risk factor for youth baseball pitchers .  Research by the American Sports Medicine Institute shows that a pitcher needs to throw twenty-five fastballs before he achieves command and is fully warmed up. The problem is that a pitcher who comes to the mound from playing another position as a reliever only gets seven tosses before facing live batters.

The ACTive® sports concussion training and certification program is designed for volunteer youth sports coaches. Coaches taking the program have been shown to have much greater knowledge of concussion symptoms and increased confidence to make decisions about concussion management.

Teaching youth hockey players to anticipate collisions by using the "ready" position may reduce the risk of concussions in hockey, say the authors of a first-of-its-kind study of head impact severity among youth ice hockey players.  The study is reported in the June 2010 journal Pediatrics.

The PPE Campaign and Coalition for Youth Sports Health and Safety will promote the widespread adoption and consistent use of an updated preparticipation physical evaluation (PPE) form for U.S. student-athletes. The coalition counts as founding partners leading medical organizations, sports governing bodies and other groups, including MomsTeam.

On May 10, 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama joined Domestic Policy Council Director Melody Barnes and members of the Childhood Obesity Task Force to unveil the Task Force action plan.  The ambitious goal of the plan: reduce childhood obesity to 5%, which was the rate before childhood obesity first began to rise in the late 1970s.

Because the growth plates at the end of the major bones in a child's arms and legs are open, their muscles and bones are still developing, and because their hormone levels aren't the same as adults, intense strength or resistance training for youth athletes is inappropriate before skeletal maturity.

During the 2003 fall sports season, MomsTeam received numerous e-mails, phone calls and visits with news far exceeding our worst fears about the number of deaths in youth sports.

A common saying in the cycling world is "It's not if you're going to crash, but when." Crashing is just part of cycling. Experience, skill and some luck can certainly help cyclists avoid crashes, but at some point, if you're riding your bike, you're going to crash. And when you do you are going to get road rash, abrasions from falling off your bike and making contact with the pavement or some other surface.

Stretching exercises maintains good shoulder flexibility and reduce the risk of rotator cuff and other injuries to baseball pitchers and other throwing athletes (football quarterbacks, javelin throwers).  Without a stretching program, athletes tend to develop muscle imbalances over the course of a season, exposing the athlete to increased risk of injury.