By Shelby Reichle, MS, CSCS
My favorite question to be asked is, “What do you do in the weight room that’s injury prevention?” Or I might hear, “Some of this (as a coach, player, or parent gestures to the weight room) is injury prevention, right?”
Questions like these come in a myriad of ways, and I’m sure you’ve been asked about the role of strength & conditioning in injury prevention more than a few times, but my answer is always the same: “All of it. All of this is aimed to reduce the incidence of injury.” I have carefully selected those words, not wanting to guarantee an injury-free athlete, but acknowledging that I certainly aim to keep our athletes on the field, court, or track year-round.
Athletic Performance Training differs from all other types of training (bodybuilding, powerlifting, CrossFit, etc.) because its end result is to improve one’s ability to play sports. This is two-fold, as it is done both through “making the glass bigger” or increasing “Physical Development Capacity,” as Zach Dechant says (see image below), and also (hopefully) through reducing an athlete’s time spent injured, thus allowing them to use their increased Physical Development Capacity more often.
I do this for my athletes using several key principles.
- Load Management
Often one of the best things we can do for our athletes to help mitigate their injury risk doesn’t involve actual training–it involves talking. Understanding the demands that our athletes are under outside the weight room is a top priority. I generaly ask these questions:
- Do they have a personal trainer on the side?
- Do they wake up at 5 a.m. to workout on their own before school?
- Do they attend private lessons on Sundays when we assume they’re resting?
- Do they have a huge test they’re preparing for and haven’t slept?
I ask these questions because these are all situations I’ve encountered numerous times.
In cases like these and many others, I modify my athletes’ workouts. Sometimes, we agree to drop one set of everything; sometimes, we remove the most taxing exercise and keep the rest; and sometimes, they complete the recovery protocol instead (a combination of mobility exercises, foam rolling, and stretching).
I also have a check-in system that we use on a daily basis, in which athletes use green, yellow, and red as a form of measurement to let me know how they are doing physically and mentally. Green means, “I’m good to go, ready to train.” Yellow means, “I’m a little sore, and/or tired.” Red means, “I feel terrible. Very tired, sore, stressed, etc.” (Red should be something like pulling an all-nighter or an unfortunate family circumstance, and always warrants a more in-depth conversation.) We have training options for all three: Green – do the workout as written; Yellow – variable; and Red – the recovery protocol.
My athletes report Green, Yellow, or Red every day in some way or another. Sometimes, it’s in a more official manner when they use the Just Jump Mat (we pair their subjective “Green, Yellow, or Red” with their jumps, comparing them to previous jumps in order to compile a more complete picture of fatigue). And sometimes in a casual manner–I’ll ask, and everyone holds up a thumb to indicate where they are on the scale.
No matter how it’s done, load management is the first step in keeping our athletes as healthy as possible, and it’s often up to us as athletic performance coaches to do this. While I would much rather these athletes sleep in, skip the morning training session, or ditch their personal trainer, these decisions are often in the hands of their parents, not the athletes themselves. While others have the best intentions, we may be their only advocate for overall load management.
- Train movements over muscles
My athletes train single-leg and bilateral drive (squat and lunge) and hinge movements, push and pull horizontally and vertically, and carry year-round. Additionally, we engage in a variety of locomotion movements in varying degrees and intensities depending on the season/time of year. Locomotion is indispensable to our training, and we will revisit this later.
Training every movement ensures that every muscle is trained. Additionally, in doing a sport-needs analysis, I may address a specific muscle or movement that targets a site of common injury. An example would be that while I always incorporate core anti-rotation movements, I will emphasize them even more so for in-season baseball players.
- Train in all planes of motion
Sagittal (including vertical), frontal, and transverse planes of motion are also trained year-round, ensuring that athletes fill “empty buckets” first while in season. One example of this includes ensuring that cross country and/or track runners are strength training and doing explosive movements in the frontal plane during their season, as that plane is often neglected in practice.
- Train explosive movements year-round
My programs always consist of hops, jumps, skips, sprints, and med ball throws in all planes of motion. Again, volume and intensity are variable depending on the season and athlete.
- Increase overall athleticism and movement options
This may sound vague, or like a “pie-in-the-sky” idea, but we do speed work, unpredictable agility work, tumbling, rolling, and crawling year-round. When we sprint, we spin, juke, and make sure to start in as many different positions as we can think of (even cartwheeling into a sprint). Try it – it’s fun!
This category also includes much of our locomotion training. My athletes gallop, skip, shuffle, and do the carioca exercise in a myriad of ways to improve coordination and challenge their mind-muscle connection. (Zach Dechant is a great resource for this if you’re interested.) I want to give my athletes as many tools in their “athlete toolbox” as I possibly can.
- Make it fun!
I incorporate games as often as I can in order to make training fun for my athletes. Unpredictable agility? Let’s play sharks and minnows! Working pure speed? Let’s race head-to-head, do a relay, or chase a ball.
Improving strength, power, change-of-direction ability, joint mobility and stability, and coordination can all contribute to reducing the incidence of injury, or at the very least, it will put athletes in a better position to return when injuries do happen.
If you have any questions about what I do or have ideas you’d like to share, I’m always happy to talk shop! Contact me by emailing reichles@columbusacademy.org
Shelby Reichle, MS, CSCS, is an Athletic Conditioning Specialist with The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Through her role at OSU, she is contracted to Columbus Academy to provide athletic performance services to all athletes, grades 6-12, as well as Capital University to work with their women’s basketball and women’s volleyball teams.
