Injury to Performance
The last step after an injury is getting back to optimum performance. Following the steps of PEACE and LOVE will get you very close but often leaves athletes and coaches thinking now what? Does the athlete just go full bore and act like nothing happened? Are there things they should or shouldn’t be doing? While each athlete is different, there are some tenets and things that should be considered.
The first question that should be asked is, why did this injury occur? Was it a freak accident or were there underlying factors that lead to the injury. This stage is where it is critical to seek the advice of a movement professional who can address any underlying issues and build a program to prevent reoccurance. If athletes skip fixing underlying issues, they often get trapped in a cycle of injury, rehab and then re-injury since they never fixed the causes driving the problem. These fixes must be then integrated into the greater training program.
The second question is what are the demands of the athlete or sport? Every athlete or sport has its own special circumstances that take place in competition. These demands should be isolated and training should be specific for them. Take a baseball pitcher for example, what are just some of the physical demands required, outside of technique. They need to be explosive in rotation, stable through their trunk, and have enough endurance to pitch multiple innings, just to name a few. A training program should integrate all of these pieces and cycle them to create adaptations in all of the domains. Once the demands of the athlete or sport have been isolated, you need to figure out what is currently preventing the athlete from achieving these. If we go back to the example of our pitcher, they need explosive rotation, commonly called speed and power. So you now know that your program must be aimed toward training speed and power in all three planes of motion. Since we want our pitcher to be able to pitch multiple innings, our third target is muscular endurance.
At this point, it is time to write your training program. You know what underlying issues need to be worked on and you have isolated your training goals to work on. You then need to look at your modifiable variables that you will manipulate in order to achieve the adaptations you are looking for. These variables are exercise choice, exercise order, frequency within a week, progression overtime, volume, intensity and rest. Then it is time to look at the application of your exercises. Most exercises can be used for many different things, so the application of them will determine the adaptation that occurs from a certain training session. Take a box jump for example. If you are doing a set of 2 max height box jumps, this is an excellent exercise for building power. If you are doing a set of 3 reactionary box jumps, it becomes a great exercise for speed. If you do as many box jumps as you can in 3 minutes, this is now a great exercise for endurance and anaerobic capacity. A good coach will always keep the training goal or target in mind when selecting repetition and loading schemes. The last consideration of a workout would be how to progress one exercise into the next during a training session. A general rule of thumb is followed so the previous exercise does not negatively impact the next and hamstring your goal. Within a workout session you want to start with speed, then power, then strength, then hypertrophy then last is conditioning. This progression allows the goal to stay the goal and elicits maximum benefits from the program.
The methods of training are many, but the concepts and principles are few. If you respect how the body functions and target training towards your clear goals, you can come back from an injury better than before it occurred.
