Slide 1Developing Young Athletes to reach their Potential
Practice Skills
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Many injuries result in long term problems—osteoarthritis.
Injury Prevention is the responsibility of the coach.
Research on Injury Prevention is Limited
Very Anecdotal
Growth is not linear.
As the emphasis on athletics has increased, so has the incidence of overuse injuries.
Overuse Injuries are relatively new. Athletes in early days often played more than one sport. But even one sport athletes did not perform specific training on a yearly basis.
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Can we practice and train while also reducing the risk of injury? Can we practice and train so that athletes want to continue?
How does the injury occur? Etiology?
Plan your injury prevention exercises.
Introduce it to athletes and explain why.
Supervise!! Waste of time if they don’t do it right—important to place a high emphasis on doing exercises correctly.
Injury Prevention
An eccentric exercise for the hamstring helps reduce the frequency of hamstring strains.
Adductor muscle strains are common problem in ice hockey.
When hip adductor strength is 80% or less than abductor strength the athlete is 17x more likely to sustain an adductor injury.
Researchers at Lenox Hill hospital in NY significantly reduced adductor strains.
Ice Hockey
Improve Proprioception--Balance
Improve stability
Improve landing
Improve Hamstrings—backward movements
Overuse Injuries
Year round training/specialization has become common.
While athletes may be more skilled, intense repetitive training can also result in overuse.
Overuse injuries are more subtle, more difficult to detect since there is not one event that causes an overuse injury.
Overuse can be prevented by appropriate training/conditioning practices.
Overuse injuries are caused by repetitive stress followed by incomplete rest and recovery.
The response of tissues in the body such as bone, muscle, and tendon have the same response as the whole body. Tissues fatigue and recover to become stronger.
Overuse Injuries
Repetitive stress is followed by insufficient rest.
Muscles, tendons, bones, and ligaments adapt to repeated stress by becoming stronger.
But when there is too much stress and/or too little recovery time, recovery is overwhelmed and tissues weaken.
Damage is the result.
Fatigue causes bone/joint stress.
The dynamic stability of a joint is highly dependent on muscle action. However, as muscles become fatigued their ability to stabilize the joint is compromised resulting in increased stress on ligaments.
Muscle fatigue also tends to alter biomechanics, resulting is increased bone and joint stress.
Humeral Head Translation After Fatigue
Pre ex -0.25 0 0.25 0.25 Post -1.9500000000000015 0 1 0.6000000000000002
Degrees of Abductions
Muscle-tendon-bone-connection
Rapid progression—especially in pre-season
Lack of planned rest
How to Practice without Overuse
Expertise requires practice and repetition.
Can you create practices that involve repetition without causing excess fatigue? Boredom?
Be careful of athletes who are on multiple teams.
Daily, Weekly, and Annual Plans are a necessity.
Active Rest
Two to Three Weeks
Athletes stay fit but do not continue with specific sport training.
Cross-train
Plan and Supervise—athletes must be educated that this time is good for them.
Weekly
Daily
Warmup
Muscles contract and relax faster when warm.
Muscles and connective tissue are less stiff.
Specific warm-up is important—when athletes are going to perform high speed activities they need to practice that exact activity at slower speeds.
Fitter athletes take longer to warm up.
Static stretching is not a warm up!
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Train for retention of skill—not immediate gain.
Massed vs Distributed
Massed practice results in better immediate performance but distributing practice results in better retention.
Reduce fatigue and poor biomechanics by distributing tasks throughout the practice or workout session.
Contextual Interference
When practice tasks are changing, retention is improved. Practicing the identical task repeatedly improves immediate performance. Practicing the task with interruption is better for retention.
Example—If you’re going to hit 100 backhands in practice, retention is superior if strokes are mixed up.
Better to mix it up since retention is better and there is less overuse.
Athlete Development
Symmetrical Development
Good Biomechanics
Athletes need to develop balanced bodies. When athletes only train those muscles immediately engaged in an activity they tend to become unbalanced. Improper joint alignment is cause for overuse.