Meet Dr. Tommy John III: The man who wants to save your child from an epidemic
Dr. Tommy John III is on a mission. The son of baseball star Tommy John, the man most known and remembered for the surgical procedure that bears his name, Dr. John believes that there is a “ sports injury epidemic” affecting our youth in this country. And in his new book, Minimize Injury, Maximize Performance: A Sports Parent’s Survival Guide , he spells out his comprehensive step-by-step strategies that he believes serve as a first step in dealing with and reversing this phenomena . Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. John about his mission and his book and our interview is below.
John Michael Antonio (JMA): What was your main inspiration for writing this book?
Dr. Tommy John (TJ): Having worked in the performance and healing field for over 17 years I started to see a growing trend: ALL sports had injury epidemics and it was mostly affecting our youth. There have been many best sellers that have alerted us of the science and stats around these sport epidemics but it left all parents saying “Now what?” Finally here’s the WHAT…the solution.
JMA: What motivated you to make it so comprehensive in its scope?
TJ: Being the son of a baseball legend who is also linked to a famous surgery bearing his name, there are a lot of parents who will think this book isn’t for them because their son or daughter doesn’t play baseball. That’s the amazing nature of the way this book has been created…it is for all ages, genders and sports. It is for ALL human athletes. And, what I’m hoping is some of the parents and grandparents put these principles into play and maybe find that they can release some hidden potential lying inside of them as well regarding their health. Because as I said….ALL sports are being affected and plagued by injury epidemics.
JMA: Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz has stated that “I played 21 years of professional ball, yet I would never have accomplished that achievement with the way youth sports lacks concern for athletes today.” What do you think he means by that?
TJ: John was very vocal about the problems going on in baseball at the highest and lowest levels, even in his HOF speech he mentioned how he will probably be the last inductee who has had Tommy John Surgery because of the business of youth sports.
John knows that kids arms are being abused early on by Travel Teams, and early specialization. And he knows if he was a kid now, he would have had more of an opportunity to fall victim to what is going on and no way would he have lasted as long as he did. His foundation would’ve been poorly built because of how youth sports are handled.
JMA: How important is it to you that you have former professional athletes like John Smoltz onboard with your message as well?
TJ: Since the majority of athletes at the highest levels of sports didn’t specialize early nor did they participate in extended Travel Team play to get where they are today, it is imperative that we keep hearing what they have to say. I have yet to come across a former elite level professional athlete or Olympian who agrees with how the business of youth sports is being run today. They know that’s not how they made it or developed and that kids today should not participate in that either.
These kids look up to their athletic heros so much so to know and constantly hear that even they didn’t specialize early on should make the ability to make the right decisions easier.
JMA: In October, your father, baseball legend Tommy John, will be writing an article for AARP magazine in which he will aim to inform the grandparents of young athletes about a lot of the dangers to young athletes that you discuss in the book. What does it mean to you to have your father working with you to spread your message?
TJ: It is very special for us both to team up again and take on such an important topic and hopefully make a change in the American sporting culture. I know we are both sick and tired of having our names attached to a surgery that is happening in kids more than adults being that 57% of all Tommy John Surgeries are being done on 15-19 year olds. Now maybe our names can be attached to a solution.
JMA: In the book, you list three main reasons for the “injury epidemic” that is affecting youth sports today with the first one of these being the business of youth sports itself. What do you mean by that and the hard-hitting assertion that when it comes to youth sports “It’s often less about the kids - and more about the cash”?
TJ: Youth sports is a 15 billion dollar a year industry. It’s because the business of youth sports has made a year-long training schedule the new norm.
Behind the scenes—and in most cases, right in front of our very eyes—our children are being put through a gauntlet of coaches, camps, and countless lessons unnecessarily. What was once meant to be played for a season is now pushed 24/7, 365 days a year. All courtesy of new “select teams” that extend a child’s time playing the game, coaches and parents who believe “more is better” when it comes to practice, as well as indoor facilities and elite showcases that encourage kids to train during the off-season and even year-round.
Today, there is no off-season for our youth athletes. Because if their uniform ever found its way back into their closet, the money would stop rolling in.
This situation is developing young athletes in desperate need of medical intervention at younger and younger ages when inflammation, surgery, and rehabilitation shouldn’t even be words in their vocabulary. These surgical and rehabilitation procedures go beyond jumper’s knee, Little League elbow, or any of the common aches and pains active kids sometimes experience. It’s about significant damage to ligaments, tendons, and joints that require serious care—injuries from which many never come back.
Even worse, at a critical phase of developmental growth when children should be naturally developing balance, coordination, agility, and spatial awareness (among other important functional skills), they are being forced instead to overtrain and perform specialized movements that are creating muscular imbalances and deficiencies within their body. Because the human body is so adaptive, many kids can keep up and persist for a period of time. The problem is, their body eventually can’t maintain the pace and demands it is being put under.
It’s why the bodies of many of today’s young athletes aren’t keeping up—they’re giving up.
JMA: The second of your reasons you give for the “injury epidemic” is “The American Lifestyle”. What exactly do you mean by this?
TJ: America may be the land of the brave and home of the free, but when it comes to being fit, our kids are failing miserably compared to other countries. In a recent landmark study of the fittest children and youth that collected data from 1.14 million children between nine and seventeen years old in fifty countries around the world, America came in close to dead last (47th place) despite the US passion for youth sports.
Youth sports may be leaving our kids overtrained and less developed, but the culture of America also plays a role in contributing to the health issues persistent among young athletes. The American diet is leaving kids malnourished, overfed, and improperly hydrated. For the first time in history we have food like substance available to us 24/7 so people are unclear about what hunger is. Now we can’t connect when we need food versus when we think we need food. And the empty calories consumed from boxed foods are leaving us malnourished constantly wanting more. In addition, the American lifestyle is not only affecting its youth’s activity level and posture, but causing kids to be less aware, overstimulated, and disconnected from certain vital physiological and neurological responses that promote healing. Technology at the expense of human movement is killing these kids. They are pinned to smart phones all day, or locked down to video games. The bits of information are creating a fight or flight response in their nervous systems that depresses the immune system. So now these kids can’t recover or repair from everyday life activities let alone early specialization in any sport leaving them more vulnerable to injury and dysfunction. The American training paradigm of bigger, faster, stronger has been perverted so badly that now we are increasing the ability but at the expense of durability. It’s like kids are going to popular training facilities asking for help in spelling their names right and all the facility does is get them to press harder but the spelling of the particular name is still wrong.
JMA: How do the choices that parents make impact this “injury epidemic” you write about?
TJ: Both the business of youth sports and the American dream have caused parents to believe that any child can become a superstar athlete. That all it takes to make their sons’ or daughters’ athletic dreams come true is to push hard enough— and the youngsters will succeed.
Today’s parents are left to feel shame by not loading up their kids’ schedule with sports so as to reach their fullest potential. It’s made the adults either too distracted or afraid to listen when their kids need to slow down. It’s made them blind to the fact that they’re being sold a bill of goods by whatever coach wants to train their kids next. It’s made every sports parent think that if their sons or daughters aren’t playing the game early, often, and always—then those children will simply get left behind.
When all they’re really getting is injured.
One of the biggest concerns I have is the fear I see in the eyes of most parents who come to me when their sons or daughters are injured. Even though they realize the best thing for their kids at that moment is having them slow down or stop playing their sport for a while, their greater worry is about where their children will rank if they take the time to heal.
It’s now the norm to think you’re a “bad” parent by not signing up for—and paying for—as many things as possible, which in its way has made many of us (whether we want to admit it or not) equally blameworthy for the issues afflicting our youth.
JMA: How did you come up with the four step Tommy John solution of “Rethink, Replenish, Rebuild, and Recover” which takes up a large part of the book?
TJ: The Tommy John Solution is a fusion of thousands of hours of research, clinical experience, and personal experimentation I’ve used successfully for years with athletes of all ages—from amateur through pro— merged with the same simple healing philosophies my dad relied on throughout his career.
The four principles that make up the Tommy John Solution—Rethink, Replenish, Rebuild, and Recover—address the four crucial areas that decide how your son’s or daughter’s body grows, how it heals, and how far it can evolve toward becoming the best version of itself. It’s a game-changing four-step process that gives parents the power to both avoid and repair the damage accrued by youth sports.
But the Tommy John Solution isn’t just about injury avoidance—and it’s more than just about sports. It simultaneously corrects the developmental deficiencies happening right now in your son or daughter. It’s a return to traditional methods and techniques that restore what was once natural in all human beings—and removes the barriers preventing your child from experiencing his or her unlimited potential.
JMA: What is “TJ’s Tryout Test” and how important do you think it is for parents to do it with their children who want to play sports?
TJ: My Tryout Test is to get parents to recognize the dysfunction that may exist in their son or daughter—to get them to fully understand what could be affecting their child’s overall performance from head to toe, so they take the advice I offer seriously.
Simply put: By running their son or daughter through a few simple exercises, I could easily “pop the hood” of that child’s engine, so to speak, and see what was truly running underneath.
I designed the Tryout Test to open the eyes of parents who may believe their child is an incredible athlete (and very well may be an amazing athlete—for now), revealing some of the huge gaps that may exist when it comes to basic functional movements their child should be capable of doing. I designed it to instantly expose potential issues that could be raising their young athlete’s risk of injury and preventing him or her from playing at his or her best.
This Tryout Test is a modified version of what I use in my office. The nine-move routine measures a variety of things simultaneously, including stability, balance, coordination, agility, endurance, mobility, posture, the ability to endure discomfort, kinesthetic awareness (sensing the body’s position in space), strength, and power.
Final note: This Tryout Test has never let me down, no matter the athlete’s age, sex, or sport. It’s something that has woken up so many parents I’ve worked with over the years to what’s truly going on with their kids. And frankly, it’s something that I hope eventually becomes a standard for all coaches to use—to gauge their young athletes’ abilities before sending them into their sport to either possibly fail or get injured.
JMA: In your opinion, what are some of the detrimental effects on over relying on tech when it comes to training for sports?
TJ: When I was young, I asked my dad for the best piece of advice he ever received that he would offer to a pitcher, and he said: “Front foot hits the ground—hand high.” And that was it.
There wasn’t any constant analysis or overthinking such things as joint angles and force line drives. There was no year-round preparation. There was no fear of losing one’s edge by stepping away from the sport to either play another temporarily—or just give oneself a break. That’s all we had back then, and it subsequently produced some of the most game-changing pitchers in the sport on those simple rules alone.
In today’s tech-intensive world, it’s possible to scrutinize every last detail of athletes’ performance. You can now evaluate every angle of every joint and clock the speed of every throw, kick, and sprint. You can virtually break down every facet of every single movement your children make, right down to the very last detail—all to shape them into a better athlete.
But just because we can doesn’t always mean we should.
When throwing, kicking, or hitting a ball, the goal is to get the ball where it needs to go. When moving forward, backward, or side to side, the goal is to move in that direction in whatever way your sport dictates. The objective is simple, or at least it should be.
Overanalyzing their every move is making some young athletes anxious about things that most times either wouldn’t make a noticeable impact in their performance anyway or could be entirely out of their control, due to how their body is constantly developing daily. All that additional stress keeps many in fight-or- flight mode, which suppresses their immune system and lowers their ability to heal faster and fight off infection.
It also makes young athletes focus more on every fail. Failure—and failing often—is just a natural part of participating in sports. Even when you’re the best in any activity, there is still a high percentage of disappointments along the way. But when children have every mistake they make called out to the nth degree, some forget that there is a desired result at the other end. They spend all their time on why they are failing in a particular skill, instead of remembering why they liked playing that sport in the first place.
Even if children were abiding by every rule in this book, using technology to evaluate them when they may still be in the early or middle stages of their development is simply not a fair assessment. You’re trying to measure the capacity of athletes that haven’t fully formed yet, who are still growing and learning how to adapt to an ever-changing body.
JMA: There is a section of your book titled “Pushing a Passion on Your Progeny “in which you discuss the notion that some parents involve their children in sports simply for their own personal and sometimes selfish reasons. How prevalent do you think this is?
TJ: I’d say at least 50 percent of the time (or more) with kids below the age of fifteen, it was the parents pushing the sport on their child, as opposed to their child’s truly pursuing that sport passionately.
I no longer teach baseball, but I’m still in touch with many pros that do, along with a variety of other sports. And even now when I ask how they’re doing, the most popular response is: “Oh, I’m just babysitting today.” But even though many instructors are passionate about what they can teach a young athlete, it is equally frustrating to them when it’s clear that athlete is there for the wrong reasons.
For some parents, having their son or daughter constantly engaged in a single sport could be more about getting extra time to themselves. Between all the camps, coaching, and leagues, if you pull it off right, it’s easy to turn a sport into a babysitting service.
Working with so many parents over the years, I can understand the need to keep all the plates spinning in a household, and having children in sports can help capture a few hours of alone time to focus on other essential priorities. And if they love playing anyway, then more power to you. But overusing sports in this way could come at the cost of getting them injured.
No one wants to see their kids fall behind, which is why most parents will turn around and see what everybody else is doing. Before you know it, that “follow the herd” mentality has your children signed up for a series of sports and activities they may care little about but said yes to, either because they thought, “Why not?” thought they couldn’t say no in the first place, or want to do them because all their friends from school are part of the team. But if that need to socialize evolves into the need to take six lessons a week and sign up for every travel team possible, then that’s a different story that can lead to injury.
JMA: When it comes to nutrition you state that our children are “overfed, undernourished and improperly hydrated in epic numbers”. In light of this, how out of balance do you think our sports obsessed culture is?
TJ: I feel like it is a bigger concern than anybody wants to admit. According to the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition, the prevalence of obesity since the early 1970s has quadrupled in children aged six to eleven years—and tripled among kids between twelve and nineteen years of age.
Many parents of young athletes simply assume their kids are active enough—so what would be the point of worrying about nutrition? They think that if their children are burning a lot of calories at practice, and aren’t presently struggling with weight issues, then why focus so much attention on nutrition.
Truth be told, even though a son or daughter may come home exhausted from practice, it’s most likely due to poor nutrition, along with a lack of sleep and bad lifestyle habits—rather than from being wrecked from a good workout. That’s because it’s been proven that youth sports, in general, don’t offer nearly as much exercise as once believed. According to studies only 25% of kids participating in sports received the government recommended 60 minutes of daily, vigorous, physical activity.
Schedules can be so hectic with youth athletes today that convenience of food becomes the better option over quality of source. Going from lesson to lesson and practice to practice has left less time for opportunities to make better choices regarding the nutrition of young athletes.
I’ve also had parents confess to me that they didn’t want to address food choices because the word “diet” has become such a four letter word…literally. That along with the fact that parents know if they make decisions for their young athlete to eat better that means they will have to acquire the same eating plan…and that just flat out scares or upsets many parents.
JMA: What do you feel are the biggest challenges when it comes to reaching parents with your message?
TJ: The 15+ billion dollar a year industry won’t like this. That kind of money has some power behind it. They are going to be in the parent’s faces more often than me, cleverly dropping nuggets that I won’t be able to counter. Fear of missing out and keeping up with the Joneses will most definitely be a big player. No parent wants to leave their kid behind. And it’s going to be that drive to be the best parent possible that should apply the principles in my book. I urge parents to Google search “sports specialization” and “youth sports injuries” as I do every morning and read the studies coming out, the articles written illustrating even more of a need for a solution. The trend will continue until the focus is changed in our homes for the better. It all starts in the homes.
JMA: What do you hope happens after the release of your book?
TJ: I hope every sports parent in America looks to it as a way to equip themselves and their entire families with an arsenal of tools to help raise healthy, happy and high functioning people. Then I hope the non sports parents catch wind that this isn’t a book about sports, rather a book about life. And how to release the unlimited potential we all have lying inside of us.
One of the greatest questions we can ask is WHY. And maybe my book will have people start to ask that to the youth sporting world suffering from injuries to limbs and minds. There is no reason a child should have to rehab from their childhood, and if my book saves one kid from that it was well worth it.
JMA: If there was one thing that you would hope parents took away from the book what would that be?
TJ: Injuries are a part of sports. Sometimes they are unavoidable. But injury epidemics are inexcusable. And the are completely reversible. There is a solution for ALL sports injury epidemics and in these pages. The solution lies in their hands now, with the main elements being in their homes. I hope parents become empowered from my book to be able to stand firm with knowledge and conviction that they know exactly the approach they should take to raise not only a high performing, exceptional athlete but also a happy, healthy young person able to take on anything that meets them on the field or court of LIFE.
Dr. Tommy John operates Tommy John Performance and Healing Center out of San Diego, a private practice that provides both athletes and entire families with integrative, individualized care plans and treatment to improve their quality of life by reducing physical and emotional pain from injury and aging and minimizing the use of pharmaceuticals or surgery. Dr. John has Master Degrees in Health and Exercise Science from Furman University and a Doctor of Chiropractic Degree from Life University, in Marietta, Georgia. His book Minimize Injury,Maximize Performance: A Sports Parent’s Survival Guide is now available on Amazon.com.
This interview was originally published on TheGoodMenProject.com