WHY ATHLETES GET INJURED

Article of the week!
Mike Robertson – Why Athletes Get Injured

This is something that is constantly on my mind. One, because no one likes to be hurt, and two, if you are hurt you can’t play. Play can be anything from competing on the field to just enjoying life. This article is compelling, not only for athletes, but for everyone in general.

All three concepts; being able to flex and bend, ability to decelerate and your work capacity carry over into any part of life. Where on the spectrum you fall dictates the significance of impact. Everyone needs good movement and the majority of athletes and people I assess have lost the ability to flex(and sometimes extend). This means that they can no longer get their joints (spine included) to go through ranges of motion. Once this is lost, all other aspects take a hit. Your ability to perceive and interact with your environment can be dramatically reduced.

“It should come as no surprise, but this is how things work with regards to physical preparation as well. There isn’t right or wrong, there’s a “right-time and right-place,” where context actually matters:
-We need extension to accelerate, to run fast in a straight line, or to push an opponent off us.
-We need flexion to decelerate, change levels, and demonstrate mobility.
If you don’t have the ability to flex, you lose the ability to change levels.” – Mike Robertson

What we find, which correlates with Mike’s article, is that athletes often get stuck in extension which leads to overuse of certain tissues/patterns. This leads to knee, shoulder, low back pain and low work capacity thereby diminishing performance.

This is why even if you aren’t an athlete it is essential to maintain mobility. If we look at it from a step by step process, if you want to improve work capacity it’s much easier when your joints can do what they are meant to do. Then muscles won’t have to work as hard to overcome joint dysfunction. If you want better brakes, then having the ability to load these joints in the correct fashion won’t put a ton of stress on ligaments or tendons as stoppers.
I love Mike’s pyramid as an example of what needs to be the base before stacking all the athletic qualities on top.

What we are seeing more and more of on instagram, facebook and training highlights, are people just putting the gas pedal down all the time. When I hear about a team conditioning session and everything is sprint, run, push-ups, burpees, run, squat and then repeat over and over, my first thought is, “I hope they are doing something to counteract that stress.” The hard part is that you will get a result from this type of stimulus, but you may not see the injury until several weeks from now. By then you probably won’t correlate it to the constant training stress that the athlete has been under.

This goes back to making sure you have a good warm-up that helps restore mobility and stability. Being smart about programming and using a metric that shows you are improving qualities like deceleration/control/strength/ and work capacity are crucial to achieving a healthy athletic career AND life.