Accurately predicting injury in collision sports

Collision sports such as rugby league and rugby union have a high incidence of injury due to the impact on their bodies during both training and competition. Much research has centered on how we can prevent injury and following on from this we have seen many papers on prehabilitation and exercises to address muscular imbalance and poor inefficient movement mechanics.

A recent paper by Tim  Gabbet (JSCR 2010) has looked at things a little differently.  He has tried to develop a prediction model for non-contact soft tissue injuries in elite collision sports. 91 professional athletes were used over 4 years with the first 2 years being about recording injury data and training load.  The second two years followed the same cohort but used a prediction model looking at planned and actual training load to predict soft tissue non-contact injuries.

Training load was measured in a very simple way as previously discussed by the BOA's Dr Marco Cardinale (http://marcocardinale.blogspot.com/2010/09/monitoring-training-load-in-team-sports.html) whereby RPE is taken post session and multiplied by the number of minutes trained to give a load.

A total of 159 injuries were recorded in the second two years and of these, 121 were predicted using the model!

Basically the model looked at a training load threshold which when surpassed increased the players likelihood of injury hugely. Players surpassing this 'threshold' were 70 times more likely to get injured whereas players who didn't were a 1/10th less injured!

Could Jonny have prevented some of his injuries?

These findings support the notion that scientifically measuring and monitoring training load can successfully predict and then prevent soft tissue injury in elite collision sport athletes.

In conclusion it is imperative that we not only plan our sessions diligently to prevent muscular imbalances and to enhance good movement mechanics to prevent injury, but also that we measure training load and establish an 'acceptable' range whereby our athletes are at risk of injury and also establish an 'unacceptable' range which occurs when they move above this range and the risk of injury is too high.

For this to work we need a progressive head coach who understands science!