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I Want to Make A Valid Contribution to Injury Prevention, But Never Have Done Before. How Do I Go About It? Hey, I’m Sarah from mostmotion® and I’m here with another video for every sports and fitness coach who wants to feel like they’re making a valid contribution to preventing injuries, but have not done any specialism with injuries at all maybe have not had any experience of injuries before either. So if that’s you, you’re in the right place.
So the first thing we need to do to help you get started with getting involved in making contribution is to recognise that actually, you don’t need to specialise in injuries to make a valid contribution. Now, there’s going to be some coaches who hate the fact that I just said that because they like to feel clever with all the big words that they know about injuries and anatomy and all that kind of stuff. But the reality is that injuries are a much bigger problem than most coaches will recognise. They are a global problem, which means that it is bigger, the issue of injuries is bigger than just one or two areas or groups of people. So just like plastic or climate change, or even the coronavirus pandemic, the idea is that it’s a global problem and we all need to work together, we all need to contribute to make it go away.
In the same way that with those other global issues, things like the pandemic, or the plastic problem, or climate change issue, is we’re not going to fix that, the scientists are not going to fix that by themselves, we all need to play our part. Now, we can’t all be scientists, we can’t all be medical professional, but we can choose recyclable products, we can use less energy, and we can wear a face mask, they’re all things that are a hugely valuable contributions to this problem. And it’s the same with injuries, okay, we all need to play our part.
Like I said, we can’t all be scientists, we can’t all be medical professionals, we can’t all be injury specialists, because they’re focusing on the treatment. And while they might be very good at that, and that the industry needs those people, it also needs people who are making the smaller contributions and making, they’re taking the small actions every day, that’s going to help prevent these issues happening in the first place. So how does that apply to injuries?
Well, it’s in every subtle movement avoidance that you notice in your clients, let’s say they’re, I don’t know, they’re doing a squat. And you notice that they just don’t look comfortable in their movements. It’s that small action that’s going to help to contribute to preventing injury in that person, because that that movement might not be painful yet. It’s in every client, we help to reconnect with their own bodies, so they can tell us about the problems that they’re having earlier, because most of the clients we have don’t recognise the difference between pain and problems, or just aches and pains in their bodies, because the industry has been teaching them through the words that we use all the time that they are moving wrong, that they have dysfunctional movement, all these things, we’re telling them that, so they don’t trust their own bodies anymore. They’re not listening to their own bodies anymore, because they’re listening to us coaches more than they need to Okay, we need to rebalance that. So with every client that we get to reconnect with their own bodies, so they can tell the difference between problems and tiredness, that helps to recognise these problems earlier, so we can start doing something about it earlier.
And it’s with every time our warm ups are focused on a variety of movement, rather than just repeating the same old movements, again, is when our cooldowns are focused on switching from the production of excess stress hormones, when we’re training to stopping that excess production of stress hormones, when we cooling down is only small little actions that we can all take. Now, injury prevention is not a sexy topic. It really isn’t. Okay. And I did a little survey in a couple of Facebook groups recently, I asked the question, injury prevention is fun, true or false? And overwhelmingly, clients would say that preventing injuries is better than being injured. Okay. So they don’t like it. They don’t like doing it. They think it’s a necessary evil. They’ll do it because it’s better than being injured. But if they had the choice, they wouldn’t bother.
So, sports and fitness coaches, we have the power to turn this tide okay if let’s say for example they Coronavirus pandemic if it had an image problem if it wasn’t a sexy topic if it wasn’t something that the public cared about then there would be a lot more people dying from this problem than there have been okay with the…
government, that’s the word, the government needed to get people on board with the idea of not going out and you know hands face space all this kind of stuff where they need to get people on board with that and this is where sports and fitness coaches really have the power to turn the tide here okay so we have the power to be the supermarket that stopped offering free plastic bags to everybody. We have the power to be David Attenborough who made saving the planet cool okay and be under no illusions your actions here really matter.
And if you think of, if you think that comparing injuries to these global problems is a bit of a stretch, it’s a bit of an over exaggeration then just think about this in 2017 Versus Arthritis did a survey of all of the money that the NHS was spending on musculoskeletal problems so that’s joints muscles bones all that kind of stuff and they came out with 22% of the TOTAL treatments spent by the NHS was on musculoskeletal injuries okay so right now the world is in the biggest economic crisis it’s ever been in, so can you imagine how much more good the nhs could do the health care systems across the world could do if they weren’t spending so much money on musculoskeletal problems?
And when we add to that the fact that these all the operations and all these things that the the healthcare systems had to postpone because of the Coronavirus, some sources have said this could take up to five years for the NHS to get back on track with those things and that’s not counting the rising tide of people who’ve had these kinds of problems over the pandemic and have decided not to go and get medical treatment for it.
It’s us we’re on the front line and if you think that this is something that you want to get involved with then you need to come and join us at on our free facebook group at injuryhackers.com, I’ll put the little screen thing there so you can see it, come and join us at injuryhackers.com we are all in that group dedicated to doing everything we can to solve the global injury crisis. Thanks for watching I’ll see you again next time