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School, football and endurance: Why it is normal for a child to feel tired after holiday

We Make Footballers
27 December 2021

When children go back to school after a holiday – especially after the six week summer break – then it is often noticeable that they are more tired than normal.

The natural reaction to this can be for a parent to scale back their child’s commitments, giving them more rest time at home to reduce what might be seen as excessive levels of tiredness.

Out go extracurricular activities, leaving what happens at school between the hours of 9am and 3pm as the only physical, mental and social activity in a child’s life from Monday to Friday.

This is not necessarily the right approach. Often, the reason that the child is tired is because over their summer break they were not as active as they are during term time. And as bizarre as it might sound, when this is the case, they can actually need more exercise to help reduce tiredness and fatigue.

A study from the University of Georgia took 36 adults and split them into three groups. Over a six week period, one of the groups did moderately strenuous exercise three times a week. Another of the groups did low intensity workouts three times a week. The final group did nothing.

At the end of the research project, those in the two active groups recorded an increase in energy levels of 20 percent. More interestingly, they were found to be between 49 percent and 65 percent less tired than those who had done nothing.

As an adult, you may well have experienced something like this yourself. Think about when you go back to work after a break. Often, those first few days returning to the office, the store, the site or wherever else, can be a struggle.
Our bodies and minds have become accustomed to having less to do whilst on our break. To suddenly be asked to get through a day of work followed by an evening of ‘normal life’ comes as a shock to the system.

And that is often after no more than a fortnight off. Imagine going back to work after six weeks of reduce activity? If it makes you feel tired just thinking about it, imagine how a child feels being thrown back into school life after a long summer holiday.

Adults power through the initial struggle and within a few days, we are accustomed once again to the rigours of the world when it is not a holiday.

The same is true of children. Whilst you might be concerned about the tiredness they display after returning to school from the summer break, the best way for them to overcome it is by powering through and rebuilding their levels of endurance.

This is something that we see at We Make Footballers. Children coming to their weekly football sessions with our fully qualified FA coaches in the first couple of weeks once schools return are often more tired and lethargic than normal.

After a few weeks in their school followed by football routine however, they are back into the swing of things and displaying normal levels of energy and vigour.

By persisting with their normal schooltime workload rather than lessening it because of an initial bout of fatigue, children build increase their endurance and become stronger – just like in the University of Georgia study.
This in turns makes them better prepared to overcome the shock of future holidays ending, ensuring that the tiredness problem is not as profound next time school returns.

There are other benefits to attending We Make Footballers even when a child feels tired after a holiday. School can be a struggle in those first weeks back, especially towards the end of the day when fatigue kicks in and concentration drops.

The quicker that a child rebuilds their endurance and stamina, the sooner they will feel less tired at school. And the less tired they are at school, the more they will learn.

One final consideration is what does a child do with their time that would have been spent playing football? If the answer is that they sit at home playing computer games or browsing social media in that hour when they could be kicking a ball around at WMF with their mates, then is that really a better option?

According to the Sleep Foundation, experts estimate that two in three teenagers get less than the recommended amount of sleep because of the impact blue light from electronic screens has on the sleep cycle.

Attempting to make your child less tired by keeping them at home, where they then spend this new-found rest time using devices which can cause reduced quality of sleep is unlikely to help. If anything, it could make the tiredness problem worse.

On the face of it, it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that physical activity is the way to overcoming tiredness. Combining school with We Make Footballers gets children used to the rigours of everyday life again, and that can only be a good thing in the long run.