Do you keep hoping your favorite athlete or team players will not be injured? Do you wish that your team will go through the season with no injuries? Do you keep hoping that any injury sustained by a player will not affect how well the team does?
I’m sure that most any sports fan will have had these desires or hopes at one time or another. It is almost impossible not to have such wishes in view of what appears to be an increasing number of injuries in most sports. Are these injuries now truly part of the game?
They say that there are only two things in life that you can count on: taxes and death. I would like to add a third when dealing with athletes: injury. I feel pretty confident that anyone and everyone who has ever played sports has experienced an injury that has interferred with their ability to play.
Injuries are now so commonplace that for most athletes and coaches they are an accepted part of sports, especially professional sports such as football and baseball. In these sports, especially now when they overlap seasons, you can read about new injuries almost every day. They’re not limited to only one or two teams, but seem to permeate the leagues.
Of course, some of these injuries are inevitable. But of the number of injuries that occur, rest assured that many are preventable. This is not startling; I have brought this out quite a few times in previous blogs. But the words fall on deaf ears, and present practices continue.
For example, it appears that Strasburg is now ready for full rehab. Keep in mind that in a previous blog I opined that his injury and need for an operation was in all likelihood, preventable. Regardless, even though rehab is now beginning in earnest, I am 99% sure that he was not using some natural methods of speeding up the initial healing process.
As he begins a strength and flexiblity training program, I can give the same guarantee that there will not be any specialized exercises that duplicate the joint actions seen in his throwing. I can also guarantee that the rehab will consist of general strength exercises to get the muscles stronger but not stronger in the way the muscles function in the throwing action.
In fact, I would venture to say that the trainers working with him do not even understand what is involved in his throwing motion. This is why specialized, or dynamic correspondence exercises as they are also known as, are not used in the rehabilitation process, especially before throwing. Instead they will have him throwing when they deem it is okay.
In football (and to a good extent in baseball), I keep reading about professional players getting injured in practice or when executing specific skills. These types of injury seem to be most predominant. Players getting injured from contact or from single blows are in the minority.
This only indicates that they are not physically or technically prepared to execute the skills involved in the game. Understand that most injuries have a neuromuscular basis; they are not simply caused from physical weakness. For example, hamstring injuries while running or cutting, back injuries from bending over and knee injuries from a quick plant and turn. Even foot problems are becoming common.
In baseball, players get hamstring or groin injuries executing a bunt and running to first base. They get groin or abdominal injuries from swinging a bat, throwing a ball or from running and making quick changes in direction. These injuries should never occur. But yet they just chalked up as part of the game.
In many instances athletes experience soreness or pain without knowing the source. They often try to play through these types of injuries only to eventually become disabled. In addition, it appears that ankle injuries are also commonplace regardless of whether the athlete gets taped before the game.
But amost all of these injuries can be prevented. There are many reasons why they are not addressed and the fault does not always lie with the team. The athletes must play a bigger role in taking care of themselves. However, this will probably never happen unless the teams become more demanding.
And so as I stated in the title, rest assured, injuries will continue. If you wait long enough, you’ll see just about every type of injury that is possible on the playing field.
For more information on this topic, read, Sports Is It All B.S. ? and Build a Better Athlete: What’s Wrong with American Sports and How to Fix It.