Your Past (Injury) Predicts Your Future
Want to know what the number one factor that will lead to an injury this year? Then read on! We’re often asked by clients how they can prevent themselves getting injured playing sport or training, or whether having a certain foot type or flexibility pattern will lead to problems down the track. These are very challenging questions to answer.
Decades of research have been devoted to identifying predictors for many different injuries, looking into numerous factors like training and competition loads, personal factors like flexibility, strength, biomechanics and equipment factors like footwear or running surface.
From all this research the most compelling answer we have: An injury in the past is the strongest predictor that the same injury will happen again in the future.
To spell that out, if you tore your hamstring in the 2019 soccer season, you have a greater risk of re-injuring that hamstring this season (plus weirdly, a calf or quad injury!)
So why is this? You could blame the human body and say that it isn’t repairing properly. We would suggest that for the vast majority of you:
- You were not physically prepared for your sport properly, in terms of conditioning, muscle strength and durability which lead to you getting injured in the first place and
- Once you were injured the Rehab wasn’t done properly, was rushed late season or forgotten about after the season finished
- So you were already operating at 95% of the capacity you need to perform well and stay uninjured, you got injured, and never got back near the 95% that got you injured in the first place and then wonder why history repeats itself.
We need to rehab you hard so you are back to 110% of your original level of strength, flexibility, balance and conditioning before we can be confident you will make a safe, durable return to sport. For many injuries we have scientifically backed rehab protocols with re-testing procedures that tell us how ready you are to return.
This is the reason we have invested so heavily in strength and conditioning in our clinic and why we make a point of outlining our full Rehab plan for you in detail at your first appointment. We are about to unbox the AxIT strength assessment system including force plates so we can more accurately measure your strength and power and give you hard numbers to aim for to get back to that 110% you need.
Another way you can prevent last year coming back to bite you is to prepare properly for this season. Jay McGuinness starts our Pre-Season Preparation and Prevention field sessions this weekend and these sessions have been shown to significantly reduce injury rates. Check out our Blog here for more info.
It’s probably a poor business model for us to actually fix you so you don’t need to come back to us all the time but it fits our core values of integrity and clinical excellence to get you to the point where we hope we don’t see you soon!
