Building a Solid Base

Houses are built on foundations aren't they?!

We wouldn't consider building a house on sand or without foundations and if we did we would be waiting every day wondering if that is the day that it will fall down or collapse in some way. This is the best analogy I can think of for athletes that I see everywhere who train without correct movement efficiency.

Lots of the worlds best strength and conditioning coaches or athletic trainers as they call them in America spend the majority of their time building solid movement mechanics and efficiency. In the last month i have been lucky enough to meet Vern Gambetta, Kelvin Giles and Bill Knowles, three of the greatest coaches in the world. One message that came through from all of them loud and clear is that we need to be coaching movements and not muscles!! Athletes with poor movement take longer to come back from their injuries.

Look at a game of football, rugby , tennis, netball, basketball etc etc and watch it in slow motion. It is all about start, stop, change direction, start, stop, change direction, over and over again. Well how often do you stop on one leg in these sports? If you watch in in slow motion you will see that it happens all the time so athletes need resilience to this movement.

The physical competence assessment (PCA) that Kelvin Giles has developed is based around assessing athletes ability to properly squat, lunge, push, pull, brace and rotate as well as jumping, landing and importantly controlling landings.

I think that as sports science and strength and conditioning moves forward in the next ten years this is the path that it must follow especially in younger, developing athletes. One example I personally have witnessed many times over is athletes being loaded in bi-lateral squats without having the stability in their legs to do a single leg pistol squat.

Vern Gambetta says that athletes should be competent at pistol squats before being loaded bilaterally. Some of the video evidence that the gurus produced was great and clearly showed how things such as small sided games involving rapid changes in direction put massive pressure on the body to move fluidly and as one to produce force without breaking. Single leg efficiency is so crucial to resisting injury in change of direction sports where between 5 and 8 times body weight is going through one leg and if poor movement has been allowed in training and then overloaded, your athletes are in trouble.

As Kelvin put it perfectly we need to give athletes mechanical efficiency leading to movement resilience leading to injury prevention. Human beings are very adaptable and as such if we exercise with poor movement then the body will find a way to adapt (poorly) leading to overuse and wear and tear injuries.

A simplified way of looking at this is as follows:

Poor movement -> microtrauma(but we cant see it yet!) -> poor movement again and again -> compensations start occurring -> degenerate and now macrotrauma -> tissue failure and major injury.

Get your athletes doing lunges, pistols squats and other movement I will cover in the next few weeks and give them the mechanical efficiency to handle the movements that their games demand for success without getting injuries that could have been prevented.

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!