All athletes want to be injury-free, but staying that way requires some work. Picture: iStock
One of the most frustrating things an active person or athlete can get, is an injury.
All that time and effort you put into training and then something which could actually be avoided, happens.
Why do injuries occur and what are some of the things you can do to reduce the risks and severity of injury dramatically?
Injuries occur for a number of reasons and the most common are the internal reasons like when one is not warmed up properly, poor flexibility and range of motion, imbalance, poor functional strength, poor gait, poor core, fatigue of muscles and external environmental factors.
Your body is no different to a car. It has joints, attachments, muscles, vital components, a frame and the internal fluids. All of these need to be warmed up properly to allow increased blood flow to the muscles and organs as well has warming up and preparing your lungs and heart activity.
If a 100m professional sprinter decided to sprint without warming up, more than likely the force, energy and torque they can generate will cause tears in the muscles. They are just not primed for activity yet and need to go through a vigorous, dynamic warm up.
What to do: Focus on warming up all your core muscles dynamically – warming up all your large muscle groups from inside-out. Old school static stretching only stretches cold muscles and the attachments and leaves the inner muscle fibres cold and stiff, increasing your chance of injury.
Dynamic stretching before exercise is crucial. Picture: iStock
Improve your Mobility and Flexibility
Mobility is the ability to move your body into a position quickly and easily without strain on your tendons, muscles or joints. Poor range of motion comes about through lack of flexibility, over-development of muscles (think body builders or rugby players) or poor range of motion or mobility.
When you perform your sport or activity, you are reacting to your environment and sometimes that environment places your body in an over-extended position and this is where athletes get hurt. The body limits your range of motion as a defence mechanism and when you are outside that range, you are vulnerable to injury and strains.
What to do: Flexibility and mobility come about by actively focusing on this area of development every day and not just once a week. Self-activities such as foam rolling, stick rolling or using a percussion massage gun can contribute to pre-exercise prompting increased blood flow and range of motion. True flexibility development happens by dedicating one to two sessions to yoga, pilates or stick mobility classes.
Doing yoga at least twice a week can help prevent injuries. Picture: iStock
Find Imbalance
See yourself as a lab rat and constantly test areas and gather data. You can either get it professionally done, in which case I then recommend a cybex lower leg assessment, sports science function movement screen test, sports science athletic assessment and then a muscle balance and postural alignment assessment from a biokineticist. Sounds like a lot but once you have the facts about your imbalance, you can start to work on balancing your muscles before wanting to grow them in size and speed.
Something like if I gave you a Ferrari to race around a track but you found out during the race your wheel alignment and suspension is out. By continuing the race, you are placing yourself at risk of an injury. There is no difference with your body. Focus more in trying to understand your body, find problem areas, balancing it and then improving each area to a high-performance level.
What to do: Perform a home assessment to start and then aim to do a full battery of assessments at least once a year. Take the results you get and spend the next year working on those areas and turning them into strengths.
Improve your Core
Single handedly one of the most important areas you can get a massive improvement in endurance, injury prevention and reactivity to external stimulus. Core is not just doing sit ups but focus on the major areas such as glutes, lower back, upper quads, hip flexors and all the deep connective tissues in your abdominal area.
See core as the pillars of a coliseum and without it, a magnificent area could not be built and would crumble to the ground. You are looking to build a high-performing body that can do pretty much anything you want but you need to focus on building your columns.
What to do: Core should be done at least three times a week for a minimum of 15 minutes. Start with the basics and master them and then move onto the more advanced dynamic core movement and functional strength training.
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