There has been considerable talk lately about overuse injuries and injuries in general. It appears that overuse injuries are the most frequently experienced by youngsters and to a good extent, high-level and professional athletes.
According to orthopedic doctors, the number of overuse injuries, especially to young athletes, is appearing in epidemic numbers. In professional football there were fifteen hundred injuries in the league in the last week of play. Whether they were directly related to overuse is impossible to tell. Overuse injuries are more common than acute (immediate) injuries and are more subtle. They usually occur over time which makes them difficult to diagnose and treat.
Most importantly, repetitive injuries are caused by repetitive stress to the tendons, bones and joints. This means that the constant stress being placed on these structures cannot be safely handled. The constant stress eventually leads to structure weakness and breakdown. The end result, depending upon your sport, is usually seen as tennis elbow, swimming shoulder, Little League pitching elbow, runner’s knee, jumper’s knee, Achilles tendinitis, shin splints, etc. Somehow it has been taken for granted that such injuries are to be expected. Many experts believe that some are preventable by keeping better records on exactly how much playing (or throwing, swinging, running, jumping, etc.) that the athlete does.
As a result in baseball, they now record how many pitches and innings a pitcher pitches. In running and other sports they log in the number of miles run, how many jumps are performed, and so on. However, regardless of the numbers, it appears that the injuries still continue without any change in frequency or severity. This is surprising to many coaches but it should not be. The simple reason for this is that the athletes are not technically and physically prepared for what they must do. Many coaches believe that pushing the athletes to their limits is needed to fully develop their physical abilities and to develop their ability to persevere. They also believe that high-intensity training must be done year-round in order to prevent injury. However, these two beliefs have been shown to be myths.
In most cases, the reverse has been shown to be most effective. Instead of high-intensity training or literally pushing the athlete to exhaustion, lower intensity and more specialized training has proven to be more effective. In specialized training, the athlete does exercises that develop their technical and physical abilities in one exercise. They duplicate the movements that the athlete executes in performing his game skills. In this way, they develop the technique and physical abilities specific to the technique for most effective skill execution. Therefore, they fully prepare the muscles and support structures to withstand the stresses involved in execution of their skills. This has been shown to prevent injury.
One of the most effective programs for learning proper technique and developing strength in the same range of motion and in the same neuromuscular pathway as seen in execution of the sports skills, is the 1 x 20 RM program. Athletes not only develop greater strength but they experience much less intensity or stress on the body. As a result, athletes do not experience injuries in comparison to the athletes on high intensity or exhaustion type programs. Because myths have been well ingrained for many years they are very hard to break but this is what will be required for sports to realize fewer injuries, if any.