Predictions are difficult, aren’t they? Especially when it comes to sporting injury. Most injuries seem to come out of nowhere, with the smallest of movements – how is it even possible to predict them?
Well, firstly, injuries may appear to “just happen”, but they don’t.
There’s two causes of all injuries:
- Collision – contact with an external object such as a person, vehicle or even the ground
- Muscle tightness – all non-collision injuries can be traced back to muscle tightness. Muscle tightness is painless but causes joint position change, which alters posture, range of movement and muscle firing patterns. This causes changes in technique, work load and performance.
Muscle tightness happens every day and builds over the course of our lifetimes through our daily lives and repetitive activities, whether that’s excessive sitting, driving, running, squatting, jumping, twisting or anything else.
Bodies adapt to muscle tightness in the same way that they adapt to exercise. If an incident such as falling over, or a training session goes unchallenged, the body accepts the tightness created as a reaction to this incident as the new normal and every day more minor incidents are added to this tightness level, with the body simply adapting to it.
This is what I describe as the “Muscle Tightness Staircase”, where pain is at the top, and relaxation is at the bottom.
Bodies can tolerate a lot of muscle tightness, and quite significant joint position change before they reach breaking point (at the top of the staircase). And it’s this breaking point that results in what I call the “Adaptation Disintegration”
This short video explains more
The Injury Prediction Point can be anywhere along the curve but, whether it’s before or after the Adaptation Disintegration, all that matters is the correlation between training and tightness.
Only you can know if your training methods are taking sufficient account of this correlation, if not, it’s guaranteed you’ll get injured at some point, but how can we confidently predict what type of injuries you’re likely to get?
That depends on where the tightness is creating the most trouble in your body. Fortunately, the body gives certain indicators of issues well before they become injuries.
Check out my FREE Injury Predictor Assessment to discover the painless joint position changes that are likely to create problems for you