How To Dodge The Injury Bullet:

The one thing everyone dreads yet effects every athlete at some point in their career; injuries.

A lot of athletes think injuries are out of their control. A push in the back, an awkward fall, sure sometimes it happens. But, a lot of the time through proper training protocols and programming a lot of injuries can be prevented or their effects reduced at least.

‘Prevention is the best intervention.’

Don’t wait until your injured to have to rehab an injury, do the prehab work early and prevent it from happening.

If you have any old or recurring injuries that you haven’t fully taken care of you need to start working to patch them up. You also need to be putting in the work to reduce the risk of getting a common injury like ankle sprains or groin strains or hamstring injuries etc.

Training to reduce injury:

So, what can we do to prevent and reduce injury rates?

Well, there are six main things we can do to try and buletproof our bodies.

1. Proprioception
2. Strength Training
3. Mobility/Flexibility
4. Plyometrics
5. Nutrition
6. Sleep

All of equal importance in my opinion, so lets break down why you need each and what you should being doing to optimise each protocol.

1. Proprioception:

Proprioception is a fancy name for balance training essentially. Proprioception is training the body to be aware of itself in space.

Studies have shown balance training can lead to a 75% reduction in ankle injuries and a 45% reduction in overall injury reduction.

Imagine being able to reduce your injury risk by nearly 50% by doing a simple balance drill like standing on one leg!!

Proprioception training needs to be the meat and potatoes of any injury prevention protocols. These can be as simple a standing on one leg and progressing up to catching tennis balls or using aquabags for building more dynamic stability.

Below are some examples of really simple exercises you can do by yourself and you MUST do if your constantly getting ankle sprains or have glass ankles.

2. Strength Training:

Strength training is another major component when it comes to preventing injuries.

Studies have shown that strength training can reduce injury risk by 69%.

Thats huge.

I’m not going to go into great detail on this one because I covered how to program your on weight training program in my last blog post, so go check that out for the full run down.

In short, a good strength training program to reduce injuries needs to include:

• Compound lifts
• Unilateral exercises
• Multi-planar exercises (working in all directions)
• Core work
• Stabilizer muscles exercises (glute medials, rotator cuffs etc.)

3. Plyometrics:

Plyometric training is vital to expose your body to force production and absorption and transferring force in a controlled setting.

I do plan on going into detail on how to program plyometrics soon, so I’ll keep it fairly brief for now.

A good plyometric program should train:

• Force absorption
• Proper landing mechanics
• Proper sprint mechanics
• Proper jumping mechanics

I cannot stress the importance of proper mechanics, especially when it comes to landing. 90% of injuries occur in the deceleration phase of a movement i.e; landing from a jump or decelerating to change direction.

All year round you need to work on fine tuning and keeping your mechanics in order protect yourself along with teaching your body to move optimally.

4. Nutrition:

You don’t put diesel in a petrol car and expect it to work properly. It’s going to fall apart eventually.

Likewise, you can’t put shit in your body and not expect to break down.

Proper nutrition enhances your recovery and improves your performances simply because your body has everything it needs to work properly.

You need to be getting enough protein into your body to rebuild muscle tissue after exercise so you can build back stronger. Likewise you need to be getting enough carbohydrates and fats into you body for energy, along with a wide range of vitamins and minerals to stay healthy.

I recently wrote an easy guide to nutrition blog that can help you get your nutrition on point so I highly suggest you check it out!

5. Sleep:

This is for me and a lot of people the harder one to get down and straight because life is busy. Trying to balance a job, school, training along with 101 other things that lead to early mornings and late nights, getting in your Z’s gets thrown on the back burner.

But, getting less the eight hours of sleep can make you 1.7 times more likely to get injured!

So, by simply getting in enough sleep we can reduce a lot of problems and make a lot of gains.

Better sleep can lead to enhanced performance and recover, more muscle gains and being mentally sharper. So we have to make a better effort to get more high quality sleep.

There are a couple of small things we can do to get a better quality sleep consistently like:

1. Less screen time an hour before bed
2. Go to bed around the same time and get up around the same time everyday
3. Have a routine for when your going to bed and when you get up
4. Don’t load up on water before bed
5. Give yourself some wind down time

Theres tons of more things we can do to improve our sleep quality, so I’ll write a full blog on it in the future, but for now reallt just focus on those five things and you’ll be on the right track.

Be Consistent and Be Patient:

There are hundreds of other things that you can do to reduce your risk of being injured, but getting 5 things down will reduce a lot of injuries and niggles that tend to pop up.

But like anything with training you have to do these consistently and be patient, the results will come.

Stay tuned to my IG and TikTok over the coming weeks for some exercises and programming to reduce injuries.

And like always, if you need anything, hit me up.

Stay workin’

Aaron.