{"id":12658,"date":"2017-07-20T09:14:29","date_gmt":"2017-07-20T16:14:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/?p=12658"},"modified":"2017-07-20T09:14:29","modified_gmt":"2017-07-20T16:14:29","slug":"young-athlete-shouldnt-specialize-early","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/young-athlete-shouldnt-specialize-early\/","title":{"rendered":"More Reasons Your Young Athlete Shouldn&#8217;t Specialize Too Early"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/olympiafitnessri.com\/media\/image\/xurban-meyer.png.pagespeed.ic.KjENa6CKvQ.webp\" width=\"228\" height=\"186\" \/>Just read a <a href=\"https:\/\/olympiafitnessri.com\/blog\/one-sport-may-be-too-much#.VafTi4vm8MY.facebook\">really compelling article<\/a> providing more reasons why young athletes who specialize too early, contrary to popular belief held by parents, actually decrease their chances of finding success later on in a sport. Two main reasons: sports become a grind rather than a joy and the increased incidence of serious injury. Great advice from hockey legend Wayne Gretzky too!<\/p>\n<p>My advice to parents of young athletes: Resist the emotion-based messages you&#8217;re hearing from our out-of-control youth sports culture and the youth-sport-development industrial complex (which cares more about making $$ than what is best for your kids) and listen to what the experts are saying about the advantages of allowing your children to develop as multi-sport athletes until it&#8217;s really time to specialize (depending on the sport, usually from early to later teens).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just read a really compelling article providing more reasons why young athletes who specialize too early, contrary to popular belief held by parents, actually decrease their chances of finding success later on in a sport. Two main reasons: sports become a grind rather than a joy and the increased incidence of serious injury. Great advice [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1517],"tags":[1147,227,1148,61],"class_list":["post-12658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","tag-athlete-development","tag-injury","tag-multi-sport-athletes","tag-sports-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}