Move over, fat kids. Rather than a nation of lazy kids, Australian children are playing too much sport, giving many prolonged injuries and burning them out for physical activity later in life.
University of New South Wales senior lecturer and Sports Medicine Australia researcher James Connor says excessive sport has become a problem.
"Activity is good for kids. Whether or not sport is good for kids is another story," he says.
Children are being over-trained across multiple sports and parents are to blame for not stepping in.
"A combination of multiple sports is the biggest problem," Connor says. "Say you play Aussie Rules or rugby. You might have three sessions and two games a week. But the problem is when you also happen to be doing basketball or indoor cricket or swimming or gymnastics, and then suddenly kids are doing three or four times the training and competition."
Sports physiotherapist and La Trobe University lecturer Henry Wajswelner says kids who are loaded up on multiple sports can suffer long-term damage and develop life-long injuries such as arthritis, tendinitis and ligament damage.
"Doing different sports every day of the week, seven days a week? That's wrong, not even elite athletes do that. Kids get so involved in all these different activities, particularly an athletic child, and they'll come into us with an injury and we get them to write down how many sports they're doing and the list will be five or six, and the parent will have no idea," he said.
Connor says over-training can turn kids off sport, which can lead to other health problems such as weight gain and depression.
"Very few of us will be Olympic athletes. It is more about physical activity; it is about going out there and being social and getting involved. You don't want to push kids to the point where they hate sport," he says.
