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Injuries: Bad luck or bad preparation?

When it comes to people who play sport you will find almost everyone has been injured at some point or another. Often, after sustaining these injuries we cite ‘bad luck’ as the main culprit, and think about how, ‘if we only hadn’t jumped in this way, landed in that way, moved in such a way, that we wouldn’t have sustained these injuries’. The truth is luck has little to do with it and the majority of injuries (particularly non-contact injuries) can be prevented with appropriate training and conditioning.

The vast majority of the time it’s not in the way in which we moved in a short period of time that caused our injury, but how we failed to move in various ways over long periods of time and it is this that stopped us from being able to protect ourselves and led us down the road to a place where the risk and likelihood of injury has been greatly increased.
A lack of strength and/or mobility in certain areas can leave us vulnerable to injury. The reason for ‘landing funny’ may be a lot less down to chance, and a lot more down to a lack of knee or ankle stability, someone who ‘has bad luck with their Hamstrings’, may not have had such bad luck if they had a better Quad:Hamstring ratio, stronger glutes, and performed eccentric hamstring training for example.
Combining muscular imbalances and bad posture with the high intensity demands of modern training and competition is a recipe for disaster. In fact over time it’s extremely likely that injury will occur at some point in that scenario, and unless the issue which caused the injury in the first place is dealt with, there is a strong chance of recurrence.

The South African Golfer Gary Player (winner of 9 Majors in his career) once famously said ‘‘The more I practice the luckier I get’’.  It may seem an unusual quote to use when talking about injury prevention, but in order to reduce injury risk (and therefore become ‘luckier’) it’s a must to practice in the right way and do so often.
Thankfully, injury prevention strategies, removing muscular imbalances and improving posture also have a carryover to improving performance.
This is where Strength & Conditioning (S&C) training shows its huge potential as a tool to not only reduce the likelihood of injury, but also improve performance simultaneously.
S&C practices can even be incorporated into a team or individuals warm-up to not only improve their performance and reduce injury for that specific session, but help them gradually improve and become more resistant to injury over time.

  Training to remove muscular imbalances, fixing faulty movement patterns and working on areas where mobility is poor are a must when trying to reduce an athlete’s (or even the average person’s) risk of injury.

S&C and Physiotherapy both have crossover benefits and goals when dealing with athletes and getting them from injury to return to play. Similarly the benefits of assessment and direction from both codes, has huge benefits to the recreational athlete in terms of problem identification and individual targeted conditioning.

S&C professionals and Physiotherapists have key roles in improving a team or individuals performance and reducing substantially the risk of injury.

The paradigm shift in training towards more evidence based functional strength and conditioning puts facilities, individuals and teams that employ S&C pro’s and Physiotherapists to design and implement their training at a huge advantage to those that do not. Training with the professionals who have specific knowledge are highly qualified and have relevant experience in this area is the obvious choice for anyone interested in performing better physically, reducing their chances of injury and looking for targeted results.

Our next few blogs will deal with common injuries, some of the common practices in S&C. 

You too can train in this type of high quality, professional environment, locally. Just contact us on 057 93 41657 now.