Winter Workout Warning

Your kid will be just fine.

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Quick note to Save the Date for THIS FRIDAY at 2PM ET/11AM PT for what I believe will be a quite useful Substack Live with speed/agility/injury prevention coach, Andre McBride. He’ll be sharing man pearls of wisdom on how to maximize your child’s speed while staying safe. Oh, and if you haven’t already, please check out my Substack Live with author Linda Flanagan on fighting the biggest temptations in youth sports. Which is the perfect segue to today’s main event…

Kids are inching toward winter break. Some families are dreaming of being nestled with hot cocoa and holiday movies. Or playing in the snow. Slowing down and reconnecting after a whirlwind of a fall.

But lurking in the background of youth sports a marketing force that doesn’t care about your cozy holiday plans. As the tentacles of professionalized youth sports have grown, so too has the push of winter workouts for non-winter sports. t’s a message of … cool if you want to chill over the winter break but don’t be surprised if you come back sucking!

Some winter workout offerings are pretty benign. They simply float out the option of their camps or programs in a take-it-of-leave-it manner. No biggie either way.

But too many are over-the-top. Why not take advantage of parents who are both delusional about their kids’ ability and trying to keep up with the Jones?

Like the explicit language in this article on the Barca website titled, “Why Smart Youth Players Choose Winter Soccer to Excel.”

Or the more subtle language in this one I got from a local college about their baseball clinics for kids aged 8-12.

“This advanced winter hitting clinic is designed for motivated young athletes who want to take their offensive game to the next level,” the email read.

It appears innocent enough. Even the language of taking their offensive game to the next level is fine. You have to sell your product somehow. But marketing it as “designed for motivated young athletes” irks me. If your family wants to go on vacation or can’t afford yet another youth sports ancillary product or is playing a different sport, does that mean your kid isn’t motivated? Will your kid fall behind their peers? Of course not, but that’s the subliminal message here. I know this outfit and guarantee they will take any and all unmotivated kids if their parents are willing to pay the registration fee.

I fell into the winter workout trap when my older son was younger, I think 9 or 10. He was part of a (very-for-profit) travel baseball program that was mildly competitive. I remember dropping him at practice in early October when one of the veteran coaches approached to ask if my son was doing their winter workouts. Upon informing him that we hadn’t decided, I swear this coach looked at me with a straight face and said something to the effect of, “you don’t want him to fall behind?” I don’t remember verbatim but the implication was that not signing up would be the beginning of the end of my son’s baseball “career.”

I thought the guy was a bit nuts but because my son’s friends on the team were doing it, I eventually signed my kid up too. Looking back, I’m sure a part of me believed at the time that not attending might impact my kid’s playing time even though he was one of the top performers on the team.

Guess what? The winter workouts were absolute garbage. Kids stood around in the dark freezing and basically learned zero. We, the parents, had the privilege of shelling out a few hundred more dollars, not to mention the burden of shuttling our kids to yet one more thing.

This is where parents HAVE to clap back. Unless your kid is begging and you have disposable income, you should really consider the opportunity cost of pushing your kid into winter workouts. There’s the cost of family time, the cost of not trying other sports, but mostly the ramifications of not getting a reset.

These kids need a break, probably way more than we realize. Even when a clinic or winter team partaking in a non-winter sport is billed as more chill, it’s still a workout for the mind. It’s like taking a beach vacation, but still having to take a couple of work calls during the week. You’re either in full vacation mode or you’re not.

This trend is particularly egregious in soccer where the keeping up with the Jones is off the charts. Again, if your kid is beyond obsessed or you need something for them to do, ok fine I guess. But it’s also fine is they don’t. U.S. soccer is already losing enough elite athletes at a very young age by forcing the notion that 8-year olds should be specialized and training year round. Then they are encouraging (and in some cases, pressuring) these specialized young athletes with still developing bodies to literally add a winter season to their fall and spring seasons. Epidemiological studies have found that between 30 and 50% of youth soccer players experience an overuse injury within a season, with the knee and ankle being the most commonly affected sites. The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health also notes that the period around peak height velocity (PHV: 11.5 years in girls, 13.5 years in boys) is especially high risk. Yet we’re bombarded with winter trainings.

And that’s my main issue is the idea of winter workouts that come with any amount of arm twisting. This literally flies in the face of everything we preach as youth sports experts and everything logical parents know. The body and mind need time to rest.

Do you notice that no professional league in any sport is year-round? Players have unions that negotiate time off to reset, and owners want healthy, hungry players. Some might go to Europe. Others might hop right into lifting. The point is they don’t have to go from a week of intensive training to another week of intensive training when it’s the off-season. They have a rich understanding of what their bodies and brains need to be at that sharpest once the preseason sharpest.

Youth sports parents could learn something from the pros. Do you really think your kid is going to fall behind is that don’t attend trainings multiple times a week for a month? Puh-lease. More likely is they return to their sport with a renewed sense of excitement and a lower chance of future attrition.