SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
updated 10/04/10
Weekend warriors and a lot of amateur athletes tend to believe that injury prevention is pretty much all about having a stretching regimen, and they are usually feeling guilty about not doing it enough. If I had a buck for every time I’ve heard someone say, just before a game of ultimate, “I should really do some stretching” … well, heck, I could afford to play ultimate for a living.
Lucky for them, they aren’t really missing anything important. As established elsewhere, stretching doesn’t really work (see Quite a Stretch) for the things people think it does, and it is particularly useless at preventing injury. Here are five ways to prevent injury that are a much better use of your time …
The best known was to prevent injury is to warm up.12 Prepare for any intense activity by doing a similar activity less intensely. In other words, start slow! To warm up your tissues, you need metabolic activity: the heat causes physical changes in connective tissues that make them more pliable. Many more complex benefits arise from the stimulus of mild physiological stress.
Many traumatic injuries are probably caused by a lack of coordination — an inability to sense and respond to traumatic forces. Developing coordination takes diligent practice at complex tasks. But you can make some progress simply challenging yourself with a wide variety of activity and sensations, and coordination can be improved.3
Adaptability prevents injury, and rigidity is the opposite of adaptability. Relaxation is more psychological than golf. To purge rigidity from your system, you will have to go on journey of self-exploration: most tension is emotional and protective. You won’t be able to relax until you know yourself better. Meanwhile, you’ll get more injury prevention mileage.
Many injuries are caused by excessive and misplaced effort! That might seem like a bit of a no brainer, but people need to learn this. I certainly did. It is one of the great lessons of martial arts!
Mobilizations are rhythmical movements that gradually expand your comfortable range of motion, providing your tissues with a variety of stimuli and stresses. The basic philosophy of mobilization is “use it or lose it.” It is a specific method of warming up that also cultivates coordination and relaxation. A link to more information is listed below.
And don’t waste your time stretching! As far as I know, stretching does not have any general injury prevention benefit.
Comments: Research has shown for years now that good ol’ stretching doesn’t really prevent athletic injuries. So what does? Warmups that “improve strength, awareness, and neuromuscular control” might just do the trick. Practicing coordination and control, basically (see Panics et al). In 2008, Norwegian researchers compared injuries in over a thousand female footballers who participated in such a warmup for a season, to another several hundred who didn’t. Athletes who warmed up had fewer traumatic injuries and fewer overuse injuries. Moreover, the injuries they did have were less severe. Static stretching was not part of the warmup, but “active” stretching was (i.e. Mobilize!). BACK TO TEXT Comments: Researchers found that injury rates were significantly lower in soccer (football) teams that diligently performed warmup exercises (“The 11+”, a warmup program recommended by FIFA, which notably does not include stretching). On the one hand, there was not much difference between a little warming up (low participation) and a bit more warming up (average participation). But players and teams that did an especially good job of warming up (“twice as many injury prevention sessions”) got solid results: “the risk of overall and acute injuries was reduced by more than a third among players with high compliance compared with players with intermediate compliance.” That extra enthusiasm went a long way! BACK TO TEXT