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Yes, sports massage can benefit teenage athletes, although they have more muscle flexibility and faster recovery times than adult athletes.
Young muscles are naturally more flexible than older ones, but this does not mean that they can not benefit from a sports massage or deep tissue massage to reduce muscle stiffness built up from training.
The more training young athletes carry on, the more they need sports therapy or massage therapy to reduce excessive muscle tension.
Preventing the building up of muscle tension, trigger points, and muscle knots, will reduce the chances of getting muscle injury such as muscle tear or tendinopathy.
The most common injuries to prevent with a sports massage in young athletes are:
Young athletes are more vulnerable than adults in these areas because of the growing process that makes less stable the joints areas. This is due mainly to the bone’s growing process.
This growing process for the long bones (like the femur, humerus, or Tibia ) occurs on the Growth Plates ( Epiphyseal Plates ) located at the end of the bone (epiphyses).
The Growth Plates are made of cartilage and are where the bone is formed, allowing the bone to grow in length.Â
The cartilage here gradually hardens into bone as the child grows.
So these Growth Plates are weaker than fully ossified bones, and under repetitive mechanical stress due to intense physical activities could be subject to an easier inflammation process than other body areas.
Different tissues of the musculoskeletal system have different adaptation times to exercise load (or training load). The cartilage tissue is the slowest one to adapt to the exercise load among the musculoskeletal system tissues, and for this reason, it is also the most fragile.
The image below shows the different adaptation times of the musculoskeletal system’s tissues to the exercise load (Lohrer 1991).
To reduce the chances of high mechanical stress in these areas, a sports massage should aim to minimise the muscle’s tendon tension.
The more there is tendon tension higher the mechanical stress on the attaching areas of the bones, increasing the risk of inflammation.
Sports massage, by reducing muscle and tendon tension, will reduce the risk of inflammation on the attachment points of the bones, such as the kneecap, heel, and great trochanter.
For example, the Osgood-Schlatter Disease causes pain at the knee where the patellar tendon attaches to the Tibia.
Sever’s Disease instead causes heel pain from the mechanical stress on the growth plate in the heel.
Young athletes who engage in sports that involve repetitive movements like running, jumping, or throwing can place excessive stress on these growth plates. Â
The most important factors to consider to reduce the chances of getting sports injuries in young athletes are:
The principal rule to prevent sports injuries in young athletes is to balance training and recovery time.
The right recovery time between training sessions is fundamental to give the musculoskeletal system the time to adapt to a certain amount of training and recover from it.
Good sleep for young athletes means at least 8-10 hours per night.
During sleeping time, muscle growth reaches its peak, and it is important to have the right amount of time, as it is a lengthy and slow process.
Optimizing the training load for your athlete is a very important factor, as overtraining is the most common cause of sports injury.
Always in terms of training load, training personalization could be necessary as not all young athletes can take the same load of training for different reasons, such as age, body type, body weight, and technical ability.
Sports Nutrition is a very important factor to consider to optimize both sports performance and recovery time. In fact, the nutritional needs of young athletes have to be tailored to different factors such as:
The amount of calories, macronutrients, micronutrients, and vitamins a sports diet is composed of, can change from different athletes and types of sports.
Preventative sports therapy, such as sports massage for young athletes before they develop symptoms (inflammation and muscle pain ) is advisable. When athletes develop pain from inflammation, it is only the last part of a muscle tension build-up process which has started weeks before.
So it is crucial to treat athletes before they develop pain as it will prevent the building of new muscle tension up and therefore prevent the chances of getting inflammation or sports injury.
We advise all our athletes, young and adult, to practise regular stretching sessions to reduce muscle tension and improve muscle flexibility.
Gait analysis for teenage athletes can be very useful to discover the root causes of recurrent sports injury or walking biomechanics issues.
Running analysis for young athletes can be very useful as well to discover the underlying causes of recurrent muscle injuries or improve sports performance.
At Mr Salus Sporting Lab in London, we have a High-Tech Gait Lab we we are able to assess and rehab many of the teenage athletes’ biomechanical issues, such as:
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