It’s easy to think about injury from a medical point of view and focus on what is broken. But you can also view it from a performance point of view: what type of plan will take the athlete is at point A to point B. Donie Fox is both a physiotherapist and athletic development coach. He joins this week’s podcast to discuss his thoughts on rehabilitation, including assessment, variation, shapes, and more. Read more
Traditionally the rehabilitation process chases pristine movements. Grace Golden has a different approach: explore permutations of each movement and force the athlete to respond to their environment. After presenting at last month’s GAIN Master Class, Grace Golden joins this week’s GAINcast to discuss her principles of rehabilitation, as well as how to create a team approach to returning athletes to play. Read more
Every month we take a deep dive into the latest research in sports science. In the August edition we start off looking at some lessons we can learn from a recent editorial giving an elite athlete’s perspective on training and load management. We also look at the modern consensus on hamstring injury risk, coaching resilience, how the athlete biological passport has impacted performance, team comedians, and more. Read more
Every month we take a deep dive into the latest research in sports science. In the July edition we start off by taking a look at some lessons coaches can learn from medicine in dealing with COVID-19. In addition, we break down the latest research on hamstring strength asymmetry, resilience, willpower, nitrate supplementation and more. Read more
Elite sport exists on a knife-edge. Push too little and you won’t get better. Push too hard and you’ll get injured. Athletes are searching for that sweet spot of performance health where they can stay healthy and increase performance. Just like performance itself, performance health is multi-faceted. Craig Pickering put together a 9-part series in June diving into detail on different aspects like load, injury, nutrition, psychosocial factors and more.
At the start of this article series, I wrote that my athletics career was a series of moderate successes punctuated by significant injuries, and that, over time, my performance became increasingly hampered by the long term effects of these injuries. As someone who has lived through the frustration of this process—and indeed, was forced to retire from professional sport because of it—I want to be able to help others avoid what afflicted me. Read more
As the performance health series continues, let’s stop to catch our breath, and briefly review where we’ve gotten to. So far, we’ve seen that the risk of injury and illness is complex and multifactorial, with a number of different models helping us to better understand how we might get injured. We’ve discussed the influence of “load”, a broad term which can include physiological, psychological, and lifestyle-related factors. We looked closely at illness and immune function and how psychological and lifestyle-related factors such as poor sleep and anxiety can increase the risk of both illness and injury. Similarly, inadequate nutrition, especially inadequate energy intake, is also a significant risk factor. This article will continue with this last point and take a deeper look at nutrition and energy intake. Read more
In the introduction to the performance health series we highlighted injuries as a major factor influencing performance. Injuries limit availability, accumulate over time, impact goal achievement, and are the a leading cause of youth athlete drop outs. As a result, we want to avoid injuries as much as we can, whilst also understanding that, in order to improve, athletes have to undertake training loads and modalities that expose them to an increased risk of injury. This is the balancing act that all coaches face, and in order to do our best we need to start off with an understanding of why athletes get injured in the first place. For that, we can lean on injury models. Read more
More and more research shows that an athlete’s availability to train and compete is a leading factor in elite performance. In looking back at my own career, this was certainly the case. Throughout the month I will be presenting a 9-part series on performance health. In other words, what factors can increase an athlete’s availability to do what is needed for performance. Read more
The purpose of this article is to give any readers an insight into how I think about and prepare people for change of direction tasks. These change of direction tasks are simply that, not agility tasks. We want athletes to be able to change direction powerfully, quickly and efficiently in competition. In preparation, I like to look at these qualities in reverse: efficiency, speed and power. Change of direction all starts with promoting efficiency by understanding the attractors of the movement. Read more
