Coaches always ask me what we do different for skiing, What exercises do we do to prevent injuries? It seems that everyone is looking for the magic pill exercise or program that solves this problem. Unfortunately, there is not one. We need to treat training itself as the injury prevention. Prepare your athletes for the great stresses of their sports by putting them under great stress!
ACL “Prevention” programs are all the rage these days. warm-ups consisting of some light jogging, body weight strength work, plyos and brief agility. These are not bad warm-ups, however to say that they are injury prevention programs is a stretch. Albeit if an individual has zero training background this warm-up will help improve their overall fitness and thus reduce injury risk. But, athletes should be introduced to a rigors dry land training program long before these prevention programs. Strength training programs need to be the chronic load that will build up a base to help reduce injuries. If you are relaying on a warm-up to be a prevention program, my question is, how shitty is your dryland training and overall fitness???...If you don’t have a long back log in training you shouldn’t be surprised if you get hurt during increased acute stress. Stop looking for the magic exercise and start building up your athletes.
During my experiences with the Chicago white sox I saw the S&C program hanging their hat on having the fewest injuries in the sport. I feel most of this comes from the great deal of chronic load. Their program entails at least 4 days a week of training along with two days of med ball and plyo work. This may sound like a lot of work for an athlete, especially in a sport that plays nearly daily. However, if built up properly with greater chronic load, athletes can withstand these weekly volumes and in my experiences, it can help reduce injuries.
Knowing that a large backlog of training is the best way to prevent injuries as your acute load increases, load monitoring becomes a huge emphasis. Monitoring Acute to Chronic load ratio is a great way to help injury prevention. Chronic load is what you have done over the last month, acute load is what you’ve done the last week. If the ratio exceeds 1.5 for a sustained time (4-5 days), this can be cause for concern. There are so many ways to monitor load, enough to keep you building excel sheets for weeks. However, the data is only good if you can A, use it to answer your questions and B, if the coaches are on board. Being able to reduce training volume inside and outside the gym at time is key to injury prevention. Load monitoring must include ALL loads, lifts, running, practice loads, ect.
Take home point. Spend time in the gym during the off-season building your chronic load through leg circuits and basic barbell work. Become extremely good at the simple things. Once your season starts reduce volume, keep the intensities high and be smart about when to input your workouts in your training schedule. Taking the time to build an athletes will reduce injuries.
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