How Much Is Too Much for Your Child to Play Their Favorite Sport?

Many youth athletes are “specializing,” or choosing to focus their time and energy on only one sport, at an increasingly young age. While these young players are aiming to improve their skills and increase their odds of playing in college and beyond, this trend has alarmed some pediatric sports medicine experts, who are seeing an increase in overuse injuries and mental burnout in these athletes.

We discussed this trend with Arvind Balaji, MD, a pediatric sports medicine specialist at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. Dr. Balaji practices in Pleasant Hill, as part of our partnership with John Muir Health.

Q: Why is this one of the most important topics for parents of young athletes?

A: It’s a favorite of mine to discuss during visits because it provides an opportunity to positively impact health in the short term and long term. Playing more than one sport, or sports diversifying, can dramatically reduce risk of injury for pediatric athletes. If kids can avoid focusing too much on only one sport, they are much less likely to get injured. That’s because many of the most common sports injuries that we see in kids are overuse injuries, or injuries that are caused by repetitive stress to the same muscle, ligament, or bone. Training the same skill or sport too much contributes to this problem. I also recommend patients and parents research the sports backgrounds of their favorite athletes. A common theme among elite professional athletes is that they played a variety of sports as kids and only specialized in their primary sport well into their high school years. This runs contrary to how we think about youth competitive sports these days.

Q: How many hours a week should a child play their favorite sport?

A: Here’s a simple rule of thumb: Your child’s age should be the limit for the number of hours they spend playing their primary sport in an organized fashion every week. So if your child is 13, they can play their primary sport for 13 hours per week, including practice and games that are supervised, coached, and competitive.

Q: Does that limit apply for the whole year?

A: It’s also so important to incorporate three nonconsecutive “dark months” per year. This means months of the year during which your child is not competitively playing any sport. Of course we don’t want them to do nothing for those months—we want them to enjoy free play with friends, or unstructured sports training, or activities like bike riding or swimming. But we want to remove the physical and mental demands of competitive play to reduce injury risk as well as mental burnout. Taking appropriate breaks will help your child return stronger—mentally and physically—to their favorite sport and help develop the foundation for a lifetime of healthy movement.