Have strength coaches contributed to rising injury rates? Explore how performance gains, programming decisions, and risk management intersect in modern sport.
The rigorous and unscrupulous demands sports put on the body are undeniable, and seemingly increasing. As it relates to the higher levels of sport, the accumulation of sheer volume and repetition alone is a cumbersome thing to manage. But from the pros, all the way down to the youth level (especially in today’s world), sports and training break the body down. Staying in the green offers an adaptive framework for how we can better support the demands of sport for our athletes.
OpeningReturn to play (RTP) is a unique endeavor, and there are several variables that collectively determine what this process looks like. Apart from your title (credentialing and licensing), your setting, resources, and training availability/frequency will all largely dictate this process. Now my tenth year as a strength coach, and despite never deliberately setting out to do so, almost my entire career has been centered around working with injured athletes. This includes everything from high
Nuance is an interesting concept, and something we’re all in pursuit of. Nuance is often associated with expertise, which is why nuanced methods are typically coveted by coaches. The problem is, most people believe nuance to be this fast-tracked biproduct of brilliance, and in a sense something that provides you an exclusive advantage over your counterparts. This is not the case. Nuance cannot be attained without extensive bouts of coming up short, experiencing failure, and having your back agai
Exercise programming has commonly been viewed as the intersecting point where the art and science applications of human performance coalesce. As I see it, the science is what determines the tangible outcome, and the art is descriptive of how we choose to get there. No doubt there are innumerable ways to write training programs, and I’m still far from convinced there is a definitive right or wrong. We have an abundance of evidence (scholarly or observationally) that has proven a wide variety of p
“Don’t wait to steady the horses.”Back in 2015, at my first ever Perform Better conference, I’m sitting feverishly in a packed room listening to one of the most transcendent strength coaches to ever do it, Mike Boyle. I don’t recall the specific topic of this presentation, but I do recall the invaluable impression Coach Boyle had on me that day. He was discussing an allegory about how the military used to “wait for the horses to steady” after firing a cannon, and how even generations later- when