7th July 2014
For the sports professional injury is a calamity leaving most wondering whether this personal and professional disaster was preventable. In some cases prevention is not feasible as the players of contacts sports will fully testify. Risk is also unavoidable in other domains. In the field of natural hazards the prevention of earthquakes and tsunamis is also not an option. Fortunately, over time, increased awareness of risk has allowed countries to effectively plan so that those regions in peril may build better defences and construct more resilient buildings, minimising the effects of the unpreventable.
In some quarters there also appears to be the perception that all injury occurrence shares the same inevitability; this belief seems to state injury will happen and therefore little can be done to prevent it. From this viewpoint movement practitioners are reduced to building stronger and more robust individuals in an attempt to deal with injury’s aftermath as opposed to stopping it in its tracks. For coaches and trainers without a rehabilitative skill-set the injured client is now a patient and must be passed on to the hands of others.
Fortunately, for both coaches and clients alike, another route can be taken. Assessing movement quality does allow movement professionals to see the presence of risk. But contrary to the ‘injury is inevitable’ belief the movement screen report offers more than just prediction. The ability to assess movement quality allows testers to not only see the ‘tsunami’ coming but to actually prevent its generation through the employment of bespoke retraining.
Performance of such exercise can sometimes lead the curious observer to ask, ‘do you have an injury?’ Such a question seems to originate from the vista movement quality is only addressed once the disaster has happened. Reducing injury risk rather fixing the injury still seems to be as novel as the reply, ‘no, but I have a risk and I’m fixing it.’
By Lincoln Blandford
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