Recently I had some interest from readers about writing an article about the importance of rest in an athlete's development routine.  As I began writing it, I realized I was just repeating what I had learned from my colleague who comes from a Strength and Athleticism focus and teaches on the subject at the University of Minnesota.  His basis for this information comes from his extensive formal education in the area and from a lot of review of scientific journal articles.  So why should you hear from me instead of getting it from an expert?

-Andy Blaylock

In Part I, of this two part series, we talked about nutrition and how to fuel the modern youth athlete. In Part II, we will discuss recovery and how to balance rest and play.

What happens to an athlete’s body while they train, practice or compete? During these activities, the body is operating at an extremely high level, producing energy and force at its highest capacity in order to keep up with the demands of competitive sport play. Metabolic processes are revved up, energy systems are used until they literally crash (fatigue) and the musculoskeletal system endures not only the demands of the muscle itself, maximal contractions at high speeds, but also impact from various objects traveling at high speeds (i.e. pucks, sticks, and competitors bodies). All of these demands can be thrown together into one simple term for our purposes, stress. Regardless of how stress manifests itself during competition, we know two things for sure, 1. It’s going to do some kind of damage to the body, 2. The body is going to need time and resources (see part I of this article on nutrition) to repair said damage.

I use this analogy in the classes that I teach at the University of Minnesota. Stress is a medieval army, think Braveheart here. Stress has horses and trebuchets, archers and whatever else a fictitious medieval army may have. Your body is a castle. Stress, like all medieval armies, is going to attack your castle. Every time that stress attacks there are two possible outcomes,

1. Stress completely destroys the castle, it was not prepared for such an awesome army and it was overwhelmed and burned to the ground. This is analogous to an injury. If there is too much stress an injury will occur.
2. Stress is turned away, but not without setting some fires and knocking over some walls. This is the most common outcome of an exercise exposure. The game, practice or training session took a lot out of little Johnny, but he’s not injured, he just needs some time to recover.

Ok, perfect, so as long as Johnny doesn’t get injured during a game or practice he’s good to go. Hold on there, what about those fires and walls that need to be repaired? If the army of stress attacks again before repairs are made there’s a good chance that they’ll burn the whole castle to the ground this time. This is most often what leads to injury and burnout in our youth. If the waves of stress come too frequently, without enough time in between for repairs to be made, then our boys and girls will be burned to the ground, or at least they will suffer from a pathology commonly referred to as “overtraining”.

You can think of overtraining as a state of being. Symptoms tend to manifest themselves in the following order, but just to make things complicated they don’t always follow this pattern, and some kids only exhibit a few of them.

1. Mental exhaustion- “I don’t want to play/practice/train today. I just don’t feel like it.” Scientific folks define this symptom as the point at which a previously enjoyable activity becomes no longer enjoyable.
2. Soft Tissue Injuries- Strains, pulls, aches etc., often times recurring. “I have a bad hamstring/groin/lower back”, these are all unreasonable things for a youth athlete to have! Soft tissue injuries are important to look out for, but often times they are brushed off as if they are unimportant. Why would an otherwise perfectly fine muscle all of a sudden get pulled? Almost always, the answer lies in too many waves of stress (chronic stress) without adequate recovery. Have you ever noticed that these types of injuries tend to occur at the end of a game, or during a stretch of 10 days of playing/practicing/training without a break? Occasionally, there are instances where an acute bout of stress, say getting hit with an elbow in the neck, can bring on soft tissue injuries. These are not symptoms of overtraining, but of acute trauma.
3. Skeletal Injuries- If your doctor ever tells you that Johnny has a stress fracture of any kind, things have spiraled deep into the depths of overtraining. It is now serious enough that you should consider pulling him out of a sport for a while in order for some serious castle renovations to take place.

So what do you do? Make sure that you mix in days of rest, at least one day of no scheduled activities per week, if not two. Look for the symptoms of overtraining. When you see them, rest more. It’s that simple.

Understand that your child’s body does not care if the political environment of your hockey team mandates being on the ice 100 hours per week, 12 months out of the year. It’s going to break as soon as the army of stress overwhelms the castle. Don’t play a role in breaking your child, instead balance rest and activity in order to foster a healthy, well-adjusted, hockey playing machine!

Zack Rourk, M.Ed.

Sport and exercise Physiologist

Owner, Perfect World Training

PerfectWorldTraining@gmail.com

One of Minnesota's premier hockey trainers, Andy Blaylock joins the YHH Staff to write about the dynamics of training, both on ice and off.  Andy is the General Manager of Competitive Edge Hockey in St. Louis Park. His content will emphasize the importance of high quality in-season and off-season training. In addition to running his own private clinics and camps, Andy has trained several organizations including Andover, Anoka, Edina, Hutchinson, STMA and Wayzata.

Andy can be reached via email at Andy@compedgehky.com