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How to prevent injuries and stay On Your Game
 

‘Prevention is better than cure’ a saying my Mother must have told me a thousand times, but it’s true. It is much better to prevent an injury than to have one. Often it is just a case of incorporating a few daily habits into our routine.

So here we go, here are a few of my top tips for preventing injuries…
 

Warm ups

Help provide blood and oxygen to our muscles, this increases the force we can put through them before an injury occurs.

Synovial fluid increases to the joints, this helps to lubricate the joints and prevent cartilage injuries.
 

Proprioceptive feedback is improved via warm ups. What is proprioception you ask? Well it is knowledge of where your joint is in relation to space and the other joints in your body, without this we are increasing our risk of predominantly ligament and cartilage injuries. Warming up can help improve this feedback loop between the joints and the brain  

 

Progressive overload

Progressive overload is when we slowly build up what we are doing

overtime e.g. increasing our running distance gradually, adding more

weight to the bar each week.

Too heavy too soon will likely lead to muscle related injuries such as tears.

Increasing the load too quickly when looking at more repetitive tasks such

as running can cause a tendon based injury, the body has to adapt to the

load that you’re putting on it.

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Strength & Conditioning

Often we go to the gym and play a sport or run etc. and we don’t link the two activities. Putting injury prevention work into your gym training will help keep you on your game in your sport. You could include landing mechanics, joint stability work, power and strength work.

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Recovery

Recovery covers a whole host of things but here we will take a look at rest days, deload weeks and overall monitoring.

Rest days are a great way to help focus your recovery, you don’t have to sit on the sofa all day, you could go for a brisk walk or a gentle cycle if you wanted to. Having days where you reduce the stress on your central nervous system (yes that gets fatigued too) and your muscles can help you become stronger in the long run as without adequate recovery growth won’t happen, but injuries could!
 

Deload weeks are a great way to keep your body on ‘tick over’ you’re still going to the gym but you’re reducing the weights you were lifting by around 50-60%, this results in your body having a chance to recover without staying sedentary for a whole week. When I have particularly stressful periods in my life I incorporate these every 4 weeks, other times when sleep, nutrition and general stress is lowered I may extend this to 6 weeks.
 

Monitoring your load when running or lifting is really important when helping to prevent injuries. From my experience of working in professional rugby clubs I have learnt A LOT. If a player came in with a muscle injury, a calf for example, which we would deem ‘preventable’ we would look back at their GPS data from the last week or so and see how far they’ve run in that time, how many times they have hit their top speed amongst other things. From this we can see have they had an increase in their load which has caused this? Now, in clubs we aim to be more proactive instead of reactive and we monitor their load better by pulling players from sessions early if they have run above a certain number of kilometres or hit their top speed ‘x’ number of times, as a preventative measure. Now with the help of our mobile phones and apps like Strava amateur athletes are able to monitor this better for themselves. Are you feeling more fatigued? Have you checked your mileage? Have you clocked up a few more than usual? Perhaps it is time for a deload.

 

Sleep

Human Growth Hormone is released at night, which helps us recover, grow and repair. Studies on college American footballers and on children have shown that not just sports related injury but general accidental injury is increased when our sleep is poor. This can be due to daytime sleepiness as well as having a reduction in meaningful recovery.

 

Nutrition

Not having enough protein/carbs post workout means that our body is unable to repair the exercise induced muscle damage that occurs as a result. Causing longer recovery times and increasing the risk of injury per a training session if muscles have not adequately adapted to training. Furthermore, there are early signs of vegan diets being more problematic for tendon injuries due to lack of collagen within these diets, more research needs to be done in this area though.

 

I could go on and on about injury prevention, but here are just a few strands for you to focus on over the coming weeks.

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