Pre-season homework - injury prevention

You have prepared your club and staff for the upcoming season and now it’s time to get your athletes slowly back into the training cycle.

This week we will discuss five topics you can cover with your athletes that will help them hit the ground running when they are back to full training.

Today we will cover way to prevent injuries that you can assign to your athletes.

Injury prevention

Injury prevention has to be the number one focus of every coach. If your athletes are injured they won’t be able to train and have a bad performance during competition.

It’s very important to instill this into your athletes because many of them are putting too much emphasis on performance and always going harder, faster, or longer. The reason for this is that you can’t measure injury prevention except in the meme-like way of “X days since the last injury”.

If you haven’t been injured in a while your athletes start to fall into the invincibility trap where they overestimate their bodies ability to recover. They keep pushing harder and harder until something breaks and they are forced to slow down.

Don’t make the same mistake with your athletes

Warm up and cool down

Warming up enables your athlete’s body to gradually get ready for physical activities while the cool down period gradually puts all systems back in every day mode.

It’s advised to spend 10 to 15 minutes in each of those activities before and after the main set(s) of the workout.

One problem that comes up in modern society is that athletes upload their workouts to different social networks (most popular Strava) where a proper warm up and cool down can lower their average pace or power output so they do a little extra during those to periods and stress the body too much before it’s ready.

Emphasise the importance of correctly warming up and cooling down and make sure your athletes stick to it.

Strength training

Strength training has been linked numerous times with injury prevention which makes it a great tool to have in your toolbox to help your athletes stay injury free. It can prevent acute and overuse injuries which, depending on the type of sport you are practicing can be extensive.

Strength training doesn’t have to be complicated and elaborate. Just by focusing on different parts of your body and working out for 10 to 15 minutes a few times a week can help you be prepared for the stress of training and competition.

A simple routine can have 2-5 exercises per body part for 1-3 rounds:

• Upper body: push-ups and pull ups in different variations, weight training hitting different muscle groups in your arms and shoulders

• Core: planks, Russian twists and different leg raises

• Lower body: squats, lunges, and calf raises

Flexibility and mobility

Stretching, static or dynamic, can help loosen up your muscles and get them ready for training and relax again after a session. If you need to do a little extra work on some muscle groups, a foam roller is an excellent tool to go a little deeper into those areas.

Some sports like gymnastics or martial arts require a lot more flexibility to execute particular movements while running or triathlon don’t require you to be too flexible.

Try keeping a balanced approach for your athletes and help them stay injury free.

Visit a physio

Training hard for weeks takes a toll on your body and one of the most effective ways you can remedy that is by going to a physio on a regular basis. They have seen every kind of injury you can imagine and are also experts in correcting smaller issues in your body alignment.

If you can, schedule regular physio appointments for your athletes because it will pay dividends in the long run.

Rest

This is by far the cheapest and easiest form of injury prevention. Convince your athletes that a good night sleep and a nap throughout the day (if possible) is the best way to recover their bodies and stay fresh.

Regularly incorporate recovery days and weeks into your training schedule to prevent overtraining issues and risk potential injuries.

Listen to your body

It’s OK to have a bad session every now and then. If your athlete doesn’t feel well, if they experience pain or discomfort, it’s important to lower the training intensity or skip training altogether.

Again, an injured body can’t train and if injuries keep piling up, performance during training sessions and competitions will be sub-par.