We can only reduce the likelihood of occurrence and here’s how:
“Injury prevention doesn’t exist.
We can reduce the likelihood of overuse injuries, but certainly not with arm swing drills & knee drives.
You can reduce likelihoods by getting brutally strong, increasing tendon resilience, and appropriately dosing & managing sport volume.”
-Ray Zingler on X
Injury prevention is impossible.
There is no training (that takes place in a controlled environment) that will ever truly prevent injuries in the random, chaotic realm of the uncontrollable environment that is sport.
If a coach or trainer tells you they are doing “injury prevention” training, there’s you a big ‘ol red flag that he or she is trying to sell you on palatable buzzwords and not truth.
Now can we reduce the likelihood of common, overuse type injuries that plague our youth? The answer to that question is undoubtedly yes because those injuries often stem from poor (sport) volume management and not random occurrence.
The funniest part about all of it to me is the guys who scream “injury prevention” from the rooftops are the same guys who are doing “sport specific” training or “speed & agility”.
So what these guys are doing is taking kids who are doing too much sport specific work as it is (what contributes to the injuries in the first place) and then compounding the volume with MORE sport specific work.
This INCREASES the volume of what is contributing to the problem, INCREASING the risk of overuse related injury.
However, the way they (temporarily to make the sale) get around it, is by slapping the “injury prevention” tag on it. Those 2 simple words are often enough to get the unknowing to buy, despite not knowing they are buying a lemon.
You can’t just do some seated arm swing drills and some “knee up, toe up” wall drives before a random array of county fair style “agility” drills and call it injury prevention.
That isn’t at all how it works.
In order to reduce the risks associated with overuse related injuries you have to do 2 things:
1) Get brutally strong. You must strengthen muscles, tendons, and ligaments so that they can handle the demands placed upon them. You can’t get around strong.
2) And this one is of equal importance to #1 – manage sport volume. If you’re just mindlessly overprescribing sport because “that’s just the way it is these days” unfortunately adverse consequences are all but inevitable.
In summary:
Get strong. Dose sport volume appropriately.
If we emphasized those 2 things, we’d see an immediate decline in the youth injury epidemic.
