Stress fractures and teenage athletes

yes and yes

Many a man back in the day ran through what was termed "shin splints" - now the medical field will have kids out of running for 4-8 weeks with a "stress reaction" or "stress fracture".

I love how these runners can have a stress anything on next to nothing for mileage. But if you live on Pop Tarts and Vitamin Water 15 miles a week may cause you to break down.

An added component is that kids are not as active as they used to be. That has to be a factor as well.

Thread Follower wrote:

I love how these runners can have a stress anything on next to nothing for mileage. But if you live on Pop Tarts and Vitamin Water 15 miles a week may cause you to break down.

That's because it's intensity that kills. High school coaches have their runners doing intervals-out-the-ass. They're afraid of the high mileage, but I guarantee easy miles will hurt you less than a crap load of intervals on the track.

speed will kill you wrote:

Thread Follower wrote:

I love how these runners can have a stress anything on next to nothing for mileage. But if you live on Pop Tarts and Vitamin Water 15 miles a week may cause you to break down.

That's because it's intensity that kills. High school coaches have their runners doing intervals-out-the-ass. They're afraid of the high mileage, but I guarantee easy miles will hurt you less than a crap load of intervals on the track.

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I completely agree with the above said. I never did a whole lot of intervals and rarely ever get(and got) injured. I easily easily reached above 50(even 60)pre- freshman season and when my coach had me do intervals I immediately starting skipping practices and running on my own and completely obliterated my whole entire team. I still don't do a lot of intervals. Mileage is the true key to XC(and road racing) not intervals.

Might also have to do with the fact I drank a ton of milk and had a multi vitamin pill and also had huge endurance going into HS. I was also always out in the sun. Still though, intervals do really kill.

"Track, cranky country, basketball, soccer, plus football youre the tip sports activities related with highlight fractures in the study."

Cranky country sounds tough.

Seriously though, are we talking about males or females? I don't know of many males who get stress fractures. So I'd say the increase is caused by more females participating in cross country and track. Not that girls can't handle it, but there are physical differences, especially at this age, that are often ignored. Plus, not only do many high school coaches not know how to coach distance running, but they more than likely do not teach anything about nutrition.

Kids get less calcium and less Vitamin D now than any other time in the last 60 years, and we wonder why there is a rise in stress fractures.

Common sense people, come on now.

More than 50% of teenage girls of less than 50% of the recommended daily calcium intake.

I had a fairly good (now) women runner tell me that mileage killer her in high school because she got multiple stress fractures. And that no kid should run much mileage in high school.

After asking her a few questions, I learned she ate like crap in high school and got in almost no calcium, wore sunscreen whenever outside and would ramp mileage from 0 to 50+ per week in 2 weeks after 2 months off.

Mileage didn't kill her lack of common sense killed her in high school. But in her mind it was all mileage and thats all she remembers. Some people are just idiots.

Remembering of course that all the HS record setters of late are putting in closer to 50-65 miles/week, not 100-130 miles/week. Below, not a high mileage runner in the lot.

Webb

Fernandez

Andrews

Derrick

Hasay

Mortensen

Chatelet

Price

Wheating

Verzbicas

I would add this to the discussion:

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/163/2/151.full.pdf+html

The emphasis is on q-angles.

if you can't wade through the body of the study, cut to the discussion section at the end. It has a lot to say.