482: Kids Brains on Sports with Dr. Julie Stamm
Age Less / Live More
Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 September 2021
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When I was 11 years old, I face-planted snow sledding and gave myself two black eyes and a slight concussion. I remember being sleepy, dizzy, and struggling to concentrate for a few days. Luckily, I only whacked my head like that a couple times growing up, but some teenagers do it every day during sports practice.
What do contact sports do long term to our brains? At what age are we responsible enough to make a decision about putting our brains in harm's way? On this week's podcast, author and PhD researcher, Julie Stamm shares her best plan for the future of brian-safe sports.
Listen & Learn
- TBI vs. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)
- Age limits, contact limits, and best practices
- How to shift a gladiator culture - and should we?
- Game changes suggestions
- Gear upgrades / downgrades
Resources & Links:
Julie's Website
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Julie Stamm, PhD, is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the book, The Brain on Youth Sports.
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- Collagen
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When I was 11 years old, my parents went out of town. I was living in a very small town |
| 0:08.2 | called Freeport, Illinois and my parents went out of town for the weekend. They left us with |
| 0:12.1 | one of our relatives, which is great, a happy relative, but we went sledding. It was wintertime |
| 0:16.8 | and we were sledding downhill next to a river and we had built a jump and we would launch our |
| 0:21.6 | sleds off the jump as kids do and it was towards the end of the evening and I decided to go all |
| 0:26.7 | at the hill and go as high as I could. Long story short, I launched off the snow jump and I landed |
| 0:32.7 | right on pretty much the bridge of my nose. I cracked my glasses. I had two black eyes. I was dizzy, |
| 0:39.2 | I was sleepy. My eyes were swollen, shut, both eyes were black and clearly I had some type of |
| 0:44.8 | concussion. I'm sharing the story with you because right away your mind probably jumped to the time |
| 0:48.5 | when you two had some type of brain head injury. Maybe you slipped on the ice as a kid. Maybe you |
| 0:54.9 | had a bike accident maybe more recently. You slipped and fell, snowboarding or skiing. Almost all |
| 0:59.6 | of us have had this happen once, twice, maybe a few times. But now let's think about that happening |
| 1:04.7 | in a controlled environment like mixed martial arts, like boxing, like American football. Again and |
| 1:09.3 | again, let's imagine that starts at like age 11, age 12 or even age 15, 16. Boom, boom, boom, |
| 1:15.2 | hit after hit and what happens is your brain gets injured and that can short your life, that can |
| 1:21.2 | mess up your mental health, that can lead to aggression and depression and all kinds of other |
| 1:25.3 | things. And as adults, I think people should be able to do whatever they want to do in this world. |
| 1:30.7 | But as children, it's a really challenging thing to navigate because parents and society, |
| 1:35.7 | we have a certain responsibility to take care of kids. I don't know where those lines are drawn, |
| 1:39.4 | but it seems like we should try to protect our kids developing brains. Part of the reason alcohol |
| 1:44.0 | laws are in place, for example, is because kids brain is even fully developed until something |
| 1:49.0 | crazy, like age 25. So what do we do with this? We have this cultural tradition, this beautiful |
... |
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