The Impact of Sports Specialization on Young Athletes: Insights from Dr. Brant D. Hulsebus and Dr. Kyle Hoeft

Early sports specialization has become the new normal. Kids are playing one sport year-round, stacking club seasons on top of school seasons, and training with little or no true off-season. But is this model helping them—or setting them up for injury and burnout?

In this ICA Sports & Fitness Science Council podcast episode, Dr. Brant D. Hulsebus and Dr. Kyle Hoeft break down the real impact of sports specialization on young athletes. They explore why families feel pressured to specialize, the rise in overuse injuries, when specialization actually makes sense, and how chiropractors can guide parents toward healthier development strategies.

You’ll learn:

• Why parents feel forced to choose one sport early  
• The surge in labral tears, chronic knee pain, and overuse injuries  
• When specialization helps—and when it destroys performance  
• Why load matters more than number of sports  
• The dangers of one-size-fits-all strength programs  
• How chiropractic evaluation changes when you know the athlete’s sport  
• How to talk to families about rest, recovery, and long-term development  

This episode is essential listening for chiropractors working with youth athletes, high school programs, travel teams, or anyone advising families on performance and injury prevention.

Presented by the International Chiropractic Association (ICA) and the ICA Sports & Fitness Science Council.

Transcript

0:05

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the ICA Sports and Fitness Science Council. Podcast for the ICA Chiro cast. I love how long our titles are. So if you're, if you're new to this, this is the ICA Sports and Fitness Science Council's version of the podcast. So there's the ICA Chiro Cast, and then there's the ICA Sports and Fitness Science Podcast. So, welcome, we are glad to have you here. I'm bu I sit on the board of the ICA Sports and Fitness Science Council, along with my good friend here, Dr. Kyle Hoeft. Dr. Hoeft do you wanna say hello again? Hello, my name is Dr. Kyle Hoeft. I've known Brant since we were in school together back in the nineties. It's good to be back again and look forward to talking more chiropractic. So if you call it last episode, we talked a little bit about overuse syndrome and we had some feedback from that. Some people wanted to know a little bit more about that and more about the you know, the overuse of things we talked about. You know, you gotta give joints time to heal this and that, but we have this thing today. This is kinda like a part two. One would say, we have a thing today where you have little junior and you want Junior to get a scholarship. Junior's gonna go on and become this great athlete. And we find that a lot of these athletes we take care of today are only playing one sport. Dr. Hay, do you wanna talk a little bit about this, this phenomenon scene with the sports? It's, it's very, very much the new thing. Now we have parents and I think I saw, I could pull the stat in the study that I got this, but to 27% of parents all across the. country expect their child to be a, a college athlete, to play college sports and basically to benefit from scholarship which is kind of shocking. So the, the next thing that, that, that becomes a problem with that is immediately, you know, that these parents are specializing in the particular sport of choice. Whether it's mom or dad that did it in, in school or it's just what the child wants to do. That is what we're seeing. Epidemic all across the board. And it's alarming because along with that are sports related injuries that I see on a regular basis in my office and I continue to see, and it's continuing to progress and we're seeing more, more of it. Staff member and. In high school, I went to high school, mostly in Massachusetts and in the fall I played football. That was my true sport. I loved the most, but in order to play defense on the football team, I had to go off for the wrestling team.'cause our defensive coach was the head wrestling coach. And then in the spring I had monkey around and play a little lacrosse, which is a big sport out east. Catching on the rest of the country, but there was nobody that just played football year round. There was nobody that just played lacrosse year round. Even the guys that were all American of lacrosse from my high school, they, they, the seasons changed. The sports changed and I'm sure that's what you grew up with too. Correct. Yeah, it is. So for me I did basketball was always kind of my favorite sport, my staples sport. But I did, I played soccer, I ran track, and I also ran cross country in high school. So I did four sports in high school. In the fall, I did cross country for two years, my freshman and sophomore year, and then basketball in the winter track and field in the spring, and there was no overlap. So we had, in high school, we had a summer league that was once a week for about six weeks over the summer. And it was one time a week where we were playing basketball and that was it. There was no trainings no practices. And then we went right into the next sport. And in the fall it was cross country. And I did, I did that for two years and then I tra I changed cross country moved into soccer. And so instead of doing that, I did soccer. So that really made a big difference for me because I did not see the type of injuries that I'm seeing now personally. Still think today's a lot of pressure from a parent. The parent has a son or daughter that excels, and I'll just say hockey because that's my sport I take care of now, and they excel in hockey and then somebody has an AU program or a off season program and they say, Hey, you can get your kid in my program. We're gonna be doing this and this. So I think today the parents have a lot of pressure not only just to hope to get the kid a scholarship, but to make the kid a better player from all these different programs. I know I never had any of those programs as a kid. You see a lot of that where we, I'm talking about the pressure from the go coaches. Yeah. it's, it's pressure from the coaches. They, they a lot of times, we'll, we'll, you know, make it clear to the child that, you know what? You wanna stay on this team, you know, let's talk soccer for me. I work with quite a few soccer athletes. My kids were soccer players in addition to other sports. And if they did not do the the program, and in our case it was Indie Premier here they would not get their, they would not get their top spot on the team. They might not get the. The second team. So it, you know, it basically became a a financial incentive too for these, for these coaches. You know, obviously they want to help your child get better, but they also like to get the extra money. They wanna get as many kids in the program as possible. So, know, then you're, you're, you're, you're running into this bottleneck of, okay, so year round training and in your case for for the hockey players, they're doing that year round and they're trying to play. Football in the fall, and so you can't do it all at once. It's too much. Even just two sports at once. It's just too much. You have to also spend time with your family. It's extremely important to, in my opinion. To be at home, have dinner, and granted it might be later at night, but at least you're together having dinner, and that doesn't happen anymore. These, these athletes that I'm seeing, it's, it's always a quick fast food run in between practices. Usually they're, they're jumping right from football to maybe hockey or soccer. and there's no time, there's no time to be, you know, with a family and, and you know, that's a problem as well. In addition to the injuries. This book here, it's actually High Performance Nutrition for the high school athletes written by Coach Kley, talking about how to live on life on the road in order to get your kids the nutrition they need when you're on the road and how to. The one mom plans a pizza party for everybody. How do you not go to that pizza party?'cause you know, it's not really what your kid needs. So it's such a demand. But you're talking about that my, my friend here actually wrote a whole book on this topic as he saw it being such an issue. But the, the, the playing the one sport, I just find that the joints in the body just wear out because they don't get a break. Is, and then if they switch sports, what do you find if they like incorporate a different sport? Are you finding they're having less injuries or, and things get a chance to do better when they switch a sport? So and that's a really good question. I had a patient recently. Soccer player. And he, he plays soccer year round, so he's doing the trainings outside of the fall season. But he also wanted to, to play football. He wanted to be a, a kicker and, and actually be a wide receiver as well on the football team. And he's not even in high school yet. He's a grade school junior high kid. And it's just. It was too much. Even, even though that's a different sport, it's just too much to do 'em both because now you're, you're, you're, you're, you're loading this, this poor kid. You're loading your back, you're loading the hip area. And and he finally his body broke down. And this poor, this poor athlete not even in high school yet, eighth grader has to rest a lab terror. In, in the hip and we never saw this kind of stuff. I'm sure you probably never saw this. Very rare. I also have basketball players that are doing it year round, and then they, they also wanna play football. They also want to do soccer. And they got knee issues. They got knee issues and, and, and they, they know, they complain about knee pain, like, you know, like a, an arthritic, know, patient for, for lack of a better, description and it's just it's sad and it's actually quite alarming. These can be avoided. This can be avoided, obviously, with proper chiropractic care to restore balance to the spine, but also you know, being able to modify the, the training so that it's just, it, it, it's not breaking the body down. You wanna build it up. Before we went live here, we were talking about two incidences where we, we, we, we actually want to specialize. We talked about, you know, playing different sports, not over specializing one sport and abusing the joints too much, but two areas where you want to, you do wanna specialize. And I know here in, in my town we have a place on the street from me where they're working with athletes and it's important for them to know what sport the kid's playing.'cause they know the most common injuries in that sport and they know the areas they have to build up and make stronger. We worked a lot with them because it is a real easy predictor to see if the. Girls, especially girl athletes, are vulnerable for ACL tears based on pelvic rotation and hip flexor weakness. And so there, when you describe them, the, this, this is the sport I really wanna play, specialize in that. And the, and the other area we'll talk about here next, but you want to comment all about the making sure you're, you're, you have a good strength coach and I think you're talking about how you've seen too many one size fits all. Yeah. I think what with what you have. Going on in the big high schools. Okay. The, the high schools that got, you know, thousands and thousands of kids, well, maybe not that many, but say more than 2000, 3000 kids. the weight, the weight room the gym class, when they all go to the weight room. Some of these classes are six, there's 60 kids at once. mean 60 kids, and you got one teacher, maybe two teacher. You know, he, he, he or she is not gonna be able to observe everyone. And so it becomes a blanket workout, blanket exercise for everybody regardless of, whether it's it it's a male or female, or a tall athlete, like a six foot four athlete, or you know, five foot nine athlete biomechanics are completely ignored, for example. If you take a six foot four athlete, let's say a basketball player with extremely long legs, maybe a 36 inch in seam, right, and you ex, you expect that. That athlete to do a deep squat, going beyond parallel, parallel or beyond parallel, that's gonna really, really stress the knees. If you're using a traditional squat weight directly over the shoulders, you take that same exercise with the deep squats, with a, you know, maybe a stockier athlete, a football lineman that maybe is only 5, 9, 5 10. is not a problem. Their biomechanics are completely different. Their knees aren't gonna suffer near. The stress that the, the taller athlete would. And so we're seeing strength coaches ignore that. They, they, they, they just don't even bring it up. And if, if a child an athlete is complaining of knee pain, oh, know, maybe you just need to toughen up. Maybe you're just not, you know, you know. More try harder. And that's, and that's Yeah. You know, the, the. The, the competition is, is, is fierce. All these kids, all these kids know that this is, it's, it's a lot different. Even the kids when we were young that didn't go to the sports and play sports are doing it now. Because if they don't, if they go home and they're not doing sports, there's nobody there. You know, Yeah. days of playing football in the street with your you know, with your neighbors. When you get done with school, that's, that's gone. Everybody's going somewhere. Well, I find another area talking about the two areas of specialization where it might be good to let somebody know is in, in the, in the chiropractic clinic, because I have the thing where I take care of, you know, minor league hockey players, minor league basketball players, I taking care of minor league soccer players. And even though they're not the, like the, the, the farm team for the Blackhawks, but there's still playing professional hockey and. They've, they're over high school age. We're talking about young twenties now. These athletes I work with, and they've gotten their whole. That part of their life where they've only played the one sport. And you know, for us it's fun 'cause we x-ray all the athletes before we take care of them and we can see trends in them. I can see when I have a professional soccer player I can see, which is their dominant leg they kick with based on the way their hips rotated. I can see the basketball player, 'cause they got that one shoulder in front of the other shoulder for how they shoot. And we call it hockey back 'cause they got, they hold the stick so they have a high shoulder on one side and a high hip on the other side for the way they skate. And what I see is that when I look at the coaches, the guys that used to play the sports, you can, you can pinpoint your arthritis and the disc degeneration. Because they didn't have chiropractors back then exactly at those spots that I just discussed based on their sport. So I think it's really, really important. You always discuss your main sport with your chiropractor, you, because you wanna talk a little bit how we custom the care for these athletes then, based on the sports they play. Yeah. So yeah, another good question. If if you have, for instance, a basketball player for instance, if I have someone that's a basketball player coming to my office there are some key areas that that need to be I evaluated, addressed, hip is one of the main ones. and the knees, basically the, the joints, the hip joint and below because of all the kinds of cuts and turns. And it's gonna be very similar in other sports like hockey and, and football too. But we really, really see that in basketball. So you know, the lower extremities, proper exercises to strengthen the, the supporting muscles around the joints, like the knee joint to help, minimize stress on the acls. I mean, Yep. I think, I think that's become a household name. Even, even with, with non-athletic families. Seems like everybody knows what an ACL tear is now because we see it. All the time. And we just saw, I think a couple of the professional athletes this past weekend. You know, for the Packers their, you know, their, their, their top defensive player had a an ACL tear Non con, non-contact, ACL tear. and It's just like every weekend or seems like every day. There's always something, someone that's got a, you know, an ACL tear. So we're seeing that all the time. So, so back to the point about basketball. We also wanna strengthen upper body too. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna be focusing on typical basketball type muscles, like shoulder muscles back muscles in addition to the arms. For instance. We probably won't focus a whole lot on bench presses for, for, for a basketball player. But definitely the shoulders. Shoulders would be a big one because when you're playing defense, you need to put your arms on at your side. It's a big deal. And you need to have strong arms as well. So you can put up shots, you know, the tricep. You know, that's, if you're shooting a jump shot beyond three, you gotta have some strength in that tricep if you're gonna be able to launch that ball. That's gonna differ from like a football player for instance. For a football player, they're gonna be explosive, right? Like, especially if they're a lineman. And we're gonna wanna do some things like power cleans, right? Some some leg presses, some know, squats. Power cleans is a great one, so, you know, different. Different exercises for different athletes. And that's just something that I've personally dealt with for, you know, for many, many years in my office. You know, I've taken care of a hockey team now for 23 years. I noticed that with the, the guys on offense. The guys on defense. You got the hip rotation, hip flexor issues, and you have a massive upper thoracic issue. But the guys that we have to change everything for when we extra, I'm like, is this guy left hit or right hand? I can't, I don't see the hockey back. And then it clicks, wait a minute, this is one of the goalies. The goal is to get crashed into head on strength and their C five C six disc areas are so beat up from all the whiplashes. And the traumas that a lot of people don't realize is a lot of times their neck actually hits the bar behind them and they get a severe, severe neck injury. So for me, knowing the sport that you're playing kind of gives me a guideline of where I should be zeroing in my chiropractic exam on and really trying to tackle. But then I see this carry over. You know, we learn a lot of cool stuff in the sports world that we actually apply to everyday patients. I take care of a lot of the local prison guards here in town, and they've all got the same brachial radiculitis, thoracic al syndrome going on.'cause they have to sit in front of computer monitors all day long, looking at 'em with the mouse, looking at the different screens. All of 'em have a numb right hand except for the one guy who's left-handed. He has that going on. So even. You see the pattern in their spine. It's amazing how that carries over to the real world application of not, not the athlete, but the everyday person. Absolutely. Do you have any, do you have any experiences with them? What I'm talking about with that? So the, the term that I'm sure you're dealing with on a regular basis as well is tech neck or. neck, or Mm-hmm. even call it social media, neck. Those are some of the more common names, and that's when you lose the normal curvature and we call it a lordosis of the neck. And that's due to, you know, looking down, you know, if you've got a phone in front of you looking down, in some cases it's driving a car for hours on end. You're straight ahead, even though you're not looking down, when you're looking straight ahead, that still reduces the curve. So I always try to recommend to my patients if you do, for instance, sit at a desk, you know, you wanna make sure that monitor as high as you can. It doesn't necessarily mean you, you have to put your neck in extension when you, when you work, but at least keep it outta flexion that can definitely minimize the potential issue of, of tech neck and tech neck. So you know, Watson. without getting into too much detail on that, that, that is a really, really common one that I see every day, every day. Okay. Yep. Yep. Well, I think we hit our, our topic here pretty good. You know, specialization is good when it comes to the chiropractic care. So the chiropractor knows what sports you play to kind of focus your care. I think specialization is a good thing when you're working with a strength conditioning coach who can actually give you the time that you need, not in a big, giant group that knows your sport to help you build the areas you need to build. But specialization's not good when you only play one sport in your entire career and you don't bounce around doing other things and giving those joints a break. Did I hit it all there? I think we did, you know we hit a lot of the, the, the key, main things that chiropractors or sports chiropractors like us see. And you know, there's of course more along those same lines, but those are definitely the main ones. And yeah, it was good. Good covering those. Right. Well, fantastic. Well, thanks for joining me for part two in this one. It was kind of a fun topic, but there was things we never got to last time, so we dove into a second one. So if you like this podcast feel free to like it. AB to us. Share this with your friends and if you wanna learn more, we have exciting conference coming up. We are, very close to launching the first ever ICA Sports Symposium designed to help you become a team chiropractor, wherever you are. The goal of this is not only to teach you technique, whether it's working with strength athletes, whether it's so concussive injuries that might happen, sign line, how to take care of 'em safely and effectively There. But also how to walk into a room and sell yourself to a team as a team chiropractor. How to work with the other physicians and doctors in the room because there's a skill there too, in how to talk to athletes.'cause they, that their body is their only, there's their, there's their sole possession in this. So the only thing they had to make money is their body. So they're gonna approach their body different than somebody else. So we look forward to seeing this. So feel free to go to the chiropractic.org, find out more about the ICA Sports and Fitness Council and we'll see you real soon. Dr. Kyle, I'll let you say goodbye here and add anything I left out. I think that was good and look forward to you know, to, to discussing more content at a later date, another podcast and it's been fun. Thanks for having me. Everybody. Bye.