Orthopedics This Week reports on HSS study findings published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, which found sports specialization and physical activity levels don’t predict athletic movement quality or injury risk, but age does.

Researchers analyzed data on quality of physical movement, quantity of physical activity, and degree of sports specialization in a cohort of 147 healthy, active children and adolescents between the ages of 10 and 18 years. All the participants completed the HSS Pediatric Functional Activity Brief Scale to assess quantity of physical activity, and the Jayanthi scale to measure degree of sports specialization (high, score of 2 or 3; low score of 0 or 1).

The researchers assessed the children’s movement quality using motion analysis during 5 repetitions of 4 different jumping and squatting motions. The maximum score per participant was 100.

Overall, those participants who were highly specialized had better movement quality than those with low sports specialization (27.6 ± 14.0 vs. 19.8 ± 10.1; p < .01).

The children who were highly specialized had higher activity levels (24.6 ± 5.9 vs. 18.1 ± 6.9; p < .001). And movement quality mostly correlated with physical activity (r = 0.335; p < .001).

Physical activity, hours of organized sports activity, hours of free, unorganized physical activity; and specialization level were not significant predictors of movement quality when controlling age.

Age alone predicted 24.2% of the differences in movement quality score (R2= 0.242; B = 3.0; p < .001).

Read the full article at ryortho.com.