Daughter needs help.

Actually, I have asked this question on other forums and Facebook and this is the only place I have encountered this nonsense. I get it. We don't agree on who's fault I think it is and we won't. Let's agree to disagree. I am just going to ignore people who perpetuate it and move on.

 

Honestly, I would love it if you just deleted it. The person who PMed me didn't even participate in the thread and I don't blame them.

 

Funny, how you made it all about you.
Again.

 

I literally never made it about me at ANY point. Other people started talking about me from the beginning. Would you please just stop? Seriously. As I have maintained every time you make this ridiculous comments I have tried over and over again to push the conversation back to my daughter's actual injury.

 

I'm just wondering, from all the people that responded here in a very clinical way, who of you actually have some kids?

I'm a dad of 2 kids, I have a boy he is 8 years old and a girl and she is 2 years old.

My son is doing kickboxing now for almost 2 years, I brought him there when he was 6, did he had a say in that NO, am I forcing him to do kickboxing NO. The thing with kids is, at young age they really don't know what they want so the parent suggests the sport that they are doing themselves at that time which in my opinion is a logical step.

Look if my son tells me that he doens't like kickboxing anymore, I'll ask him what he wants to do instead and if he can't come up with a clear answer he will keep training kickboxing.

I'm secretly teaching him a bit of stickfighting too

Point being, as a parent everyone has their own principles to follow, a very important principle that I want to give to my kids is that you can't be a quitter when things aren't going your way.

@Combat Sports as a parent look for the balance in training and rest in combination with doctors and therapists, everyone here has an opinion but not many have stood in your shoes, keep that in mind. And don't take everything so personal

 

Same sort of thing with my daughter. She does TKD with me and, at least initially, the impetus for that was all me. No way she would have found her way into martial arts without me doing it first.
I want her to experience the benefits that doing a sport or martial art can bring. Being active, meeting people, dealing with adversity, trying hard, achieving short and long term goals, building confidence, etc etc.
She's been doing it a couple of years now and, even though it's my birthday today, she asked to go training tonight! So we will.
If she doesn't want to do TKD anymore that's fine but she has to do some sort of sport or "active" activity (please not football though!).
Both my kids will be "forced" to do some sort of sport.
Trying to build good habits to take into adulthood is part choice, part gentle coercion, part reward and even on occasion part forcing them do something that will benefit them even if they are upset.
Just this last session she got upset because she found it hard to do some of the spinning kicks and other fancy techniques and felt stupid. So that was a lesson in how even her blackbelt dad can't do some of those techniques well, it's not about how she compares to other people but to herself of yesterday, practice makes things easier, keep on going, trying hard and even how those techniques are nice and everything but not as important as the more basic and fundamental stuff.
Bringing up kids is a balancing act.

 

My view on kids in sports.

To talk about this I first kind of feel it is necessary to talk about how kids are doing these days. And I have to say that I worry about the future. The parenting "experts" are kind of encouraging parents not to push their kids to do anything difficult. I have seen kids come to wrestling practice and dislike the cardio aspect of the WARM UP and quit. A lot has changed in the past couple of decades with regards to kids and their resilience. And their motivation. Some of this I would say also comes from the video games. We had video games when I was a kid but you might play them for a hour or so and would still end up outside playing Football or whatever with your friends. The video games are so much more sophisticated now then they were then that they went from being a distraction to being something kids show addictive behaviors towards. And you can be "elite" in a social circle by being good at video games without a drop of sweat shed, with a tall glass of soda and a big bag of chips next to you.

There is certainly something to be said about the "over pushing" parent but I honestly think this aspect of the problem is blown out of proportion. Wade Schalles has a blog where he pointed out that wrestling only retains maybe 40% of it's participants after a couple years of wrestling. That's not because 60% of parents are crazy. There is a mentality in the coaching community nowadays to blame all of the burnout on the parents. And while yes, that does happen I have seen far more kids quit because it was not fun to get your head beat in all the time. Some of this is because youth wrestling unlike say youth TKD, Karate, etc has no belt rank system. So your kid can end up competing against kids who wrestle more often, go to camps, have better partners, etc. And there is just no way to make that fun. But some of it is also because kids are not being encouraged to work harder as a solution to not liking to lose.

There is a lot of talk about how "It's not about winning and losing..." but I usually see it's people who's kids have dozens of trophies and gold medals who are saying that. Yes kids do need to learn how to lose. But they also need to learn how to win. And sometimes that is not going to happen without some genuine push.

I knew nothing about wrestling when my kids showed interest. I had watched the UFC and MMA a lot in the early days but kind of fell out of it after a while. One day I had found out they let women into MMA and was watching a Strikeforce Match with Miesha Tate. My daughter was about 7 at the time and I had not even thought about if I would let my kids watch MMA, but I was watching it on my computer in the living room and my daughter leaned over my shoulder to see what I was watching. Miesha won her match and my daughter asked how she got so tough. I said the announcer mentioned her background in wrestling. A few days later my daughter came home with the flier for the local youth wrestling club they were passing out at school. My son decided he wanted to try it as well.

My daughter's mental disposition is such that she can handle a lot of adversity before getting discouraged. And she had some early success. My son on the other hand gets very emotional when he loses and said to me he wanted to quit about a month or so in. I told him that as he asked me to buy the equipment and pay the club fees that he would finish the season before he quit.

He had a rough first season, but eventually started to bring home some medals. I bought my daughter new gear and he asked when he was going to get his new gear. I reminded him he had said he wanted to quit at the end of the season and he said he had changed his mind and that he felt it was stupid that he said that. So he got new gear. And the talk of quitting was over.

I know a lot of parents who would of simply went along with their kid asking to quit right away. And I have watched that play out over and over. Wrestling and I would say most combat sports are such that you have to push them past the threshold that will allow them to finally realize the outcome of their hard work. When they are in the early stages of developing skills and conditioning it's boring, and tough. That's not the fun part of the sport. The fun part is going back to competition and realizing that all of that drilling, calisthenics, etc got your hand raised and maybe even got you up on the podium at the end of the tournament. But if you don't nudge them past that point they will quit. And I see us teaching kids very bad life lessons when we let them do that. I feel the same about participation trophies, and other things we are doing to protect a kid's self esteem at the expense of their understanding that hard work earns you the right to have a high self esteem.

So at one point I took my daughter to a girl's national tournament. I was actually going to help a friend of mine take his very gifted daughter to the tournament. As they were very poor and did not have a vehicle. My daughter was with me so we figured why not enter her? She ended up taking 2cd place. She told me she really wanted the big eagle trophy they give out and seriously wanted to be a national champion. I told her I would help her with that. But she would have to make some sacrifices to be able to get where she wanted to go. I had talked to the family of the girl who had taken 1st and she trained very often. Went to camps. Wrestled through the summer and fall. Doing more research I found this was actually rather common across the board.

So this kind of brings me to my second point about when to push. Science says that a kid's ability to grasp the long term consequences of actions does not really even start working in your brain until the mid 20's for many people. This is why you think you know everything when you are 18. It's also why if you ask your kid what they want to do on a given day they are likely to give an answer that has a very short term thinking to it. When my daughter set out to be a national champion, if I were to ask her on say a Thursday "Do you want to get on the treadmill and work on your cardio today? Or do you want to play video games?" a kid is going to say "Well I want to play video games!" And I had similar conversations with my daughter. But I would ask her "Ok... but is it still your goal to win a national title next year?" and she would say yes. So I would tell her to get on the treadmill.

It actually took her a few years to realize her goal. But leading up to that she accomplished a lot of other things along the way including being a State Finalist, State Champion, etc. I realized she was finally ready and we went to Oklahoma for the Women's Folkstyle Nationals and she ended up on the top of the podium, achieving her dream. When she was done, I asked her if the sacrifices were worth it. She said without hesitation that they absolutely were.

Ronda Rousey once said "Training was my whole life, and it was because I wanted to be able to win the Olympics more than I wanted to go to the movies with my friends. It's funny, because people get offended by the mind-set that it takes to be the best." when talking about the sacrifices she made as a kid and teen to get where she got in Judo. And this article written by her mother was pretty influential on me. ANNMARIA'S BLOG ON JUDO, BUSINESS AND LIFE

Rousey never went on any dates or to any parties. This is where we differ. My daughter does certainly go to less of these activities then a lot of other girls her age but she absolutely goes to a fair share of them. And she has time to herself every week to do whatever she wants. I do encounter the people who are "offended" by the mindset it takes to be the best particularly when my daughter who has never been anything but nice to any of her competitors beats their kids. Rather then trying to help their kids do better they typically just try to tear you down as it is easier to do so then to put in the work and to help them put in the work.

If my kids told me tomorrow they wanted to stop participating in the martial arts and pursue careers in stamp collecting I would take their extra gear to a resale shop and get them some stamps. I do feel however I would insist that they develop sufficient self defense skills but that could be accomplished with far less participation and time. But they would still have to finish the season.

 

In my opinion, that is a very well-reasoned and valid point. My Dad had a similar philosophy, and I hope to apply it myself as a parent.

When I was a kid, I chose to play Baseball instead of Hockey (I'm a terrible Canadian). Occasionally, when I played a bad game, I felt like quitting. Just like you, he told me that I had to stick it out for the rest of the season. If I still felt the same way at the end of the season, I could quit. He wasn't expecting me to be a major league pitcher or anything, but he did push me, and did not let me quit in a whim after having a bad game. I was better for it. I played Baseball until I was about fourteen before getting into Martial Arts.

I know what you mean about modern "parenting" and lack of pushing. It actually reminds me of Homer Simpson quote:
"If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing. You just stick that guitar in the garage next to your short-wave radio, your karate outfit, and your unicycle, and we'll go and watch TV."

My daughter is getting to the age where we are going to have to find her an activity to do. Although I would love to see her get into Martial Arts, I'm not going to force her into anything, but I will insist that she do something. Whatever that activity turns out to be, I will do my best to motivate her to her full potential without putting her off of it. I imagine that it can be a bit of a balancing act at times.

 

Damn good post by Combat sports there and I can honestly say I would have followed a very similar path and choices if my kids had exhibited similar drives and desires (they don't yet have that sort of drive, and maybe never will, so I'm still in the stage of "forcing" them to do stuff I know will benefit them).

Had another insight into being hyper-mobile last night at training. My daughter can short-cut technique and posture to achieve a position or technique.
For example when she's dong a turning/roundhouse kick she can leave her supporting foot behind and not pivot correctly and yet still kick head height (as she was doing last night).
Her flexible hips and other joints cover up her lack of technique and alignment. Obviously not pivoting correctly is bad for her joints, lacks power, isn't technically correct and ultimately could be damaging.
When she's switched on and aware she can kick well. But when she's not paying attention her form can very easily slip and bad habits creep in.
I'm not clued up enough on wrestling and cross-fit to comment much but I'm pretty sure there will be similar positions and techniques where being flexible can cover up lack of alignment. Especially in fast or dynamic movements where it's harder to spot things that may be wrong.
Just off the top of my head would be knees not tracking over the feet/toes in leg bending or squatting. Very easy for the knees to collapse in or out when you have lax hips and ankles.
Another thing to look out for would be sitting back on her legs with her feet splayed out to the side (rather than on the instep or using active toes). Like this...



Such positions are very easy for hyper-mobile people to achieve (girls especially IIRC) but is not good posturally and can exacerbate the hyper-mobility.

 

I wish I had more time to reply to this but I will when I come home from work. I observed very similar things with wrestling. Particularly when it came to shooting. A lot of American coaches unfortunately feel that if you can't shoot you can't wrestle and while yes it is important it's not the only path to success. There are high level wrestlers who were never explosive but were instead flexible. They are just far less common. Wade Schalles, and Mitch Clark are two examples.

 

So now that I have more time.

The sport of wrestling is growing quickly for women at an ever accelerating rate. What I would say I wish was growing as fast is wrestling coaches understanding of how to coach girls who have a different anatomy to boys. But beyond the issue of gender, there are people who seem to have a certain genetic makeup that encourages flexibility over power below the hips.

In my "quest" to find the best path for my daughter, there were a couple things I noticed right away.

Coaches were asking her to do things that it became clear after a few years she was just not physically up to doing. The problem is, most wrestling coaches are not strength coaches and therefore don't always understand that some kids are either not ready for a given technique, or that it's even possible it will never something they will excel at.

A couple of things that come to mind.

Wrestling up from the bottom.

Shooting/explosive movements.

For bottom the prevailing wisdom is to teach the stand up. An explosive motion pretty much straight up where you come from your hands and knees to one knee, and then to your feet. My daughter was terrible at this. But they made her drill it over and over and over. While she has shown some improvement it is certainly never going to be her go to movement on the bottom. She has since had considerably more success with various rolls, elevators, etc.

For shooting and other explosive movements it's a similar issue. They drill shots over and over and over and over and were frustrated when they would tell her to shoot and she didn't generally comply during matches. The funny thing is they also complain endlessly about kids using "low percentage" moves but to a kid who is not explosive, most of the standard shots ARE low percentage.

I started to consider that for girls in general when they compete against boys, it made more sense to look for role models who were men who were known to be weaker then their opponents and overcame that deficit. The first wrestler we came across was Wade Schalles. Wade was big during the 70's and still holds world records for the most pins. Nowadays he primarily coaches MMA fighters in Catch Wrestling. My daughter gravitated to his coaching style right away. He has a very clear and concise way of explaining things and is extremely cerebral in his approach which appealed to her being as how she has always been the "intellectual" fighter.

I exchanged some emails with Wade and he watched a lot of her videos. One of her favorite moves is the "Spladle" which is a pin that relies on flexibility and timing. Wade invented the move. I asked him a bit about his own career and a few things stuck out.

For one, he was not a shooter. I believe he said "Well... I knew how to shoot but I was so terrible at it that it would be better to say I never did it at all..." I spoke to a man who refereed some of his matches many years ago and Wade was known for being able to get out of really dangerous situations and pull off the win. He eventually got so good at the Spladle that he could stick his leg out begging someone to shoot on it and they wouldn't dare. Wade used leverage and timing to pin far stronger opponents. And not just on the local level but the collegiate and international level. Wade said in reference to shooting that he didn't like anything where he had to go down to one knee. This phrase stuck in my head as when I was a kid I hated anything resembling that as well.

At a tournament one day I watched a kid totally dominate a much larger looking kid from a very tough team with leg riding. It occured to me that while girl's typically have deficiencies in upper body strength, they are known to have better hips. Leg riding uses the hips and legs to control an opponent. That is what brought me to this video of NCAA champion Mitch Clark winning his finals match by tech fall in the first period. No shots, a good throw, and then a whole lot of hip power.



I found out that Mitch Clark coached clinics within a few hours of us and started taking my daughter right away. It was not long before she was controlling boys who were considerably stronger then her. Coaches would start panicking when she got on top of kids. Talking with Mitch there was another parallel. Mitch Clark said he hated shooting, and that he hated anything that involved going down to one knee. Mitch Clark got 32 takedowns in his senior year of college which is an absurdly low number, and most of his takedowns came from scrambling. basically stealing takedowns from opponents.

So this all comes back to what we were talking about. I realized that my daughter also would find ways to "emulate" movements that she wasn't actually capable of doing. So a lot of what you said in your post sounds exactly like my daughter. Fortunately her future high school coach who watches her with close attention and even comes to coach her sometimes at matches has made it clear he fully believes she will not be a "power" wrestler and that she doesn't have to be.

Moving forward, we are looking closer at scrambling. The use of leverage and timing and flexibility applied to thwarting your opponent's takedowns. Ben Askren said he would invite my daughter to his invitation only advanced scramble camp. So we are looking forward to seeing where she will go with that. Just have to wait for her to heal.

To sum up why I went on this long segway, the physiology you described is very parallel. And we are looking at attacking the situation to use her flexibility to overcome strength disadvantages. Even with that though she will have to try to get as strong as she can without injuring herself.

 

I'm curious about not liking shooting techniques where you go down on one knee.
I recall when I wrestled in high school that I didn't like that either, but I can't recall why.

More recently I would occasionally work takedowns in BJJ when I was training it, and I tended to avoid shooting down on one knee. It's like an instinctual "don't do that" in my head. I'm not really sure why, thinking about it now. Part of it may have been I didn't have spats or knee guards and didn't want to scrape my knee open on the mat.

Combat Sports--did anyone who has said they don't like doing those techniques explained why they don't like them?

 

I didn't wrestle, but I hated doing anything resembling lunges. What I remember was just feeling really weak in that position. When you are wrestling you are expected to do the "penetration step" to get under your opponent's defenses and then be able to explode back up with at least some if not all of your opponent's body weight on you. Particularly for the kids who don't have developed quads/hamstrings anyway this movement is awkward at best if not impossible until they spend a lot of time on it. But I suspect that as Smitfire pointed out a good deal of these kids are just finding other ways to mimick the movement.

I have a friend named Jake Herbert who was on the Olympic team and was a 2 time NCAA Champion. He pointed out that in Russia they place much more emphasis on general athleticism particularly at the young ages. It's one of the reasons I sought a strength coach for my daughter. Before her injury she was starting to be able to really shoot, including beating a kid she has been trying to beat since she was 8 years old, mostly by scoring on her feet. Was still awkward but she was at least capable of it.

 

I haven't checked in on this thread for a while so will need to go back and read the last few pages. But I'll just quickly comment on Smitfire's post because his description of his daughter's kicking technique and sitting habits serves as an important indicator of hip structure (which has a bearing on other sports and daily living activities).

This:

and her preference for sitting between her heels (called "W-sitting"), may indicate that she has a greater angle of femoral anteversion. This is where the head of the femur (the "ball" that sits atop the thigh bone) is turned forwards in relation to the axis of the knee. We need anteversion because it's the key for rotational stability of the hip joint, and varies between 4° and 20°, with an average of about 13°.

An excessive anteversion, where the femoral neck which is rotated far forward, facilitates greater internal rotation in the hip joint but restricts external rotation. This has implications for numerous structures, most notably an increased risk of knee and ankle instability due to the impact on the natural 3D spiralling of the leg when supporting loads. Other issues that can develop include decreased core activation, poor posture, impaired motor development, and early-onset osteoarthritis.

It isn't clear to what extent anteversion can be influenced by intensive training during growth, but what is certain is that femoral anteversion does not continue to change after hip growth has been completed in about the sixteenth year of life. Some strategies to mitigate potential complications include: encouraging alternative ways to sit (e.g. "lotus" position encourages external rotation in the hip joint without also forcing the tibia into external rotation, as happens when sitting cross-legged); spending time squatting with a theraband wrapped around the thighs to encourage driving the knees out and therefore learning conscious awareness of external rotation; core strengthening; and focused stretching of the adductor, soleus, and hamstring muscles.

Combat Sports, if your daughter displays these habits as described by Smitfire, then I would suggest having her physical therapist explore the possibility that an excessive angle of femoral anteversion may be contributing to her pain symptoms.

 

SO UPDATE:

Upon switching physical therapists, my daughter felt better within a couple of weeks, and is back on the mat with very mild discomfort only when being taken down. In retrospect now it is clear that it was not even the severity of the injury but the completely ineffective work of the physical therapists we went to first that were preventing her from getting better. She has recently returned to competition and just took 1st place today at a tournament near us.

I am obviously happy she is better, but rather annoyed that she missed 95% of the season and feel that if she had been with this therapist from the start she would of been able to compete far sooner. Which really bothers her as looking at the brackets in several of the key tournaments including the boys state tournament she had a serious chance of winning.

What I learned is not all physical therapists are equal in their ability or follow through.

 

It's good to hear that your daughter is doing better.

Good on her for taking 1st at the tournament.

 

Wade is one of the nicest dudes ever. I've done 2 seminars with him and have experienced his Spladle.

I'm not much of a shooter either. Never have been that dynamic, and even in my prime my double legs were more of a Goldberg style spear.

Age plus extreme wear and tear now settled in. I'm more into upper body throws and the only time I do go for the legs, it's from a set up via arm drag, 2-1 or simply hooking the leg up from the clinch.

 

Well Mushroom, if you like Spladles, (And Banana Splits...) you will love these.