Being prepared For Sport or Work; How can Physio’s help me?
Over the last few years we have been developing our understanding around the relationship between training load, life load and injury. We understand that your current ability to tolerate physical load is very important and this is commonly reflected by your overall strength and strength endurance tests.
‘Load’ (Training, Life and Injury) can encompass sport and non-sport burden (physiological, psychological or mechanical stressors) as a stimulus that is applied to the human system.
When it comes to load there are many factors that influence your ability to tolerate it. We know biomechanical factors along with emotion and lifestyle stressors will impact your current loading tolerance. We also know that sleep has a large influence on your ability to tolerate load and stay injury free. It has been shown that athletes who sleep fewer than 8 hours have 1.7 times greater risk of an injury than those who sleep 8 hours or greater.
Increased Training load and Increased Stress loads
For example, youth athletes may need to be rather aware of issues especially around times of increased training along with life stress. This is common and an example is that of higher school work, exams coming up and therefore pressure to get it all done which results in youth athletes getting less sleep to get that study in. This common type of situation can lead to about a 2 fold increase in injury risk.
The training, performance and injury relationship is complex and multifactorial. However, if you can be prepared physically you are one step ahead and are managing one key component to staying injury free. We know the best way to get better is to keep training and injuries affect training. This is where physio’s can help!
How can Physiotherapy help?
Utilising a strong strength and conditioning focus which is what our Physiotherapists here at TPM do so well the goal is to improve your loading ability, also known as strength.
In general, higher training loads can be linked with better performance while at the same time inappropriate training loads may increase risk or pain. Physiotherapists can help you find this fine line.
We understand that from a biomechanical perspective there are some strength KPIs and this is where physiotherapy can help assist and make sure you are at that required level for your sport or occupation. We need your muscles, tendon and ligaments to be able to tolerate training and playing. They also importantly need to be resilient to that load over long periods, such as weeks or months.
One way we know we can improve your risk, is through strength training. With strength training you can improve your tissues ability to be resilient and cope with load, reducing your injury risk. Hamstrings, calf and groins are some common areas where we need to have a good underlying strength ability.
Almost all sports require you to run. One area of the body we see issues is the calf and the Achilles tendon. Issues develop here in simple terms due to one training at a level higher than what they can tolerate.
The calf raise test is commonly used to examine your basic strength ability.
If we look at the average amount of single leg calf raises (using a hand for balance, at 1 per second on a slight decline) Where do you fit in?
Remember this is the average, so if you are a runner or someone who jumps you would like your numbers to be considerably above the average seen in general population. In summary we need to manage all loads, physically and mentally. From a physical standpoint the greater our strength tolerance, our ability to tolerate load, the lower our risk of injury.
You can not go wrong getting strong. If you’d like to see how Physiotherapy can assist, Touch base with TPM.
Physiotherapist ~ Stent Card
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Gabbett TJ Debunking the myths about training load, injury and performance: empirical evidence, hot topics and recommendations for practitioners. British Journal of Sports Medicine 2020;54:58-66.
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Hébert-Losier, K., Wessman, C., Alricsson, M., & Svantesson, U. (2017). Updated reliability and normative values for the standing heel-rise test in healthy adults. Physiotherapy, 103(4), 446-452.
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Soligard T, Schwellnus M, Alonso J, et al How much is too much? (Part 1) International Olympic Committee consensus statement on load in sport and risk of injury British Journal of Sports Medicine 2016;50:1030-1041.
