By Jim Fanara, CSCS
The strength & conditioning industry as changed over the past 15-20 years. Barriers between strength training, athletic performance preparation, physical therapy and sports medicine have broken down. Clinicians, PT’s, sports medicine doctors and coaches as well as other practitioners of things like yoga and massage therapy have collaborated to develop innovations in training methods.
Industry innovations have focused on reducing injury rates. Why has reducing injuries become so important? Healthy teams win more. And coaches, GM’s and Athletic Directors get paid to win. Also, the large investments teams make in the salaries paid to professional must be protected. There is no return on investment when a player is hurt. That’s why the college and professional sports industry demands that the best athletic performance coaches deliver effective injury reduction strategies to teams and players.
For the professional athlete, many components of training and health care are utilized to reduce injury rates. Nutrition, sleep hygiene, chiropractic care, soft tissue techniques, physical therapy techniques, blood workups, DNA testing and new innovative training methods are all employed to help reduce injury risk.
Among the training innovations of the past decade is a focus on improving an athlete’s movement quality. Improving movement quality enhances the capacity to achieve a strong stable position during sports movement; critical to reducing injury risk. But it’s also the key to safely improving athletic performance.
When you watch athletes at the highest level compete, their movements often seem effortless. That’s because achieving strong stable positions enables the body to produce more force at a faster rate with less stress on joints, tendons, ligaments and muscles. When more awkward positions are necessary, improving range of motion and end range stability protects joints and improves reaction times. Producing more force with less effort also reduces fatigue. Increased fatigue is a major factor contributing to the incidence of non-contact injuries.
While many of the methods used by the pro’s are not really accessible to young athletes, there are still quite a lot of techniques that young athletes can use to help improve performance and reduce injuries.
Young athletes can benefit from training programs that incorporate movement quality improvements. For example, techniques that improve hip and ankle mobility can help stabilize the lumbar spine as well as improve knee position when landing, stopping and cutting.
For pitchers during the season, maintaining the “normal” range of motion of a throwing shoulder that is specific to the individual athlete is a key component to reducing injury risk. Muscular balance among the large and small shoulder muscles is also important to minimizing shoulder and elbow injuries.