Injury prevention

If your child seems to be constantly picking up little niggling injuries or always seems to be tired, use these basic injury prevention tips, including how to identify growth spurts and a few other potential problem areas:

  • Talk to your child to find out what their physical education program is like at school. If your child needs more activity, look for additional programs that might complement golf skills.
  • Are they enjoying all of their sports or are some becoming a chore? Are all the coaches involved aware of what else your child is doing, so they can adapt the training to fit in with this?
  • Make sure they eat well and get enough sleep.
  • Do they have constant aches or pains?
  • Are they happy and upbeat?
  • Are they improving their performance and doing well in school?
  • Are they having a growth spurt? It is a good idea to have a wall where you record their height at regular intervals to monitor this. You may need to ask the coaches to reduce their volume of training or alter the training surface or type of training if this causes any pain in their muscles or joints. Make sure the coaches are aware of this information.
  • Make sure they get to training in time to do a full warm-up and also have time to stretch afterwards – often the child is reliant on the parent for lifts to and from training and competitions.
  • Make sure their golf equipment fits your child. Changes in growth will change the angles at address.
  • Are they warm enough or cool enough? Use layers they can take off after they have warmed up and can put back on as needed. Make sure they dress for the conditions.
  • Make sure anyone working with your child knows of their allergies, health problems and medication – asthma, nut allergies, etc.
  • Do they have at least one day per week with no sport at all so their bodies can recover and benefit from the training? It's important to look at the volume of sport and exercise your child is doing. While it's important to keep them active, too much can be harmful. If they have no rest days, their bodies will not be able to adjust and they will not improve their performance.
  • Your child will always want to do their best to please you and make you proud. This sometimes means they will push themselves through pain, so be aware that sometimes it will be your responsibility to step in and monitor things if you have concerns.
    Sometimes less can be more, from a training and performance point of view. Focus on quality not quantity.
MOST IMPORTANTLY – ARE THEY HAVING FUN??

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