Think hard for a minute about all of the injuries you have suffered during your life. How many of them are from an external agent, like a kick from an opponent? How many of your injuries are ones where you have 'hurt yourself'?
With football being a sport that involves body contacts from time to time, impact injuries are always going to be part of the game. To what level do unintended, self-inflicted injuries need to be a part of the game? How do we even manage to hurt ourselves in the first place?
Occasionally we hurt ourself trying to do something beyond our current abilities but more often, it is in doing something that we already can do where we will injure ourself. Sometimes, we will even hurt ourselves performing the easiest of actions like bending down to pick something up. The difficulty of the movement we are performing has a relationship with likelihood of injury but it is certainly far from the entire story.
HOW TO STOP HURTING YOURSELF
A larger part of the story can be found in how we perform the movement. For example, in the case of hurting yourself bending down – an unloaded, slow movement that many people do with ease – a trained eye will see that the movement is distributed poorly. One or two areas will be doing way too much while others won't be working at all. Some areas will even be doing the exact opposite of what you are intending to do. Watch many people bend forward and you will see lots of them unintentionally using the muscles at the back of the neck to pull the head away from the floor, making it much harder work to bend forward.
Taking a person that operates in this inefficient, uncoordinated manner and then having them doing something demanding like playing football increases the likelihood of injury. With an efficient, coordinated player whose joints and muscles work well, risk is greatly minimised.
Think of over-stretching for a ball and straining a hamstring. How come the hamstring doesn't lengthen appropriately (after all, we are usually not attempting to reach inhuman ranges) to reach the ball easily and instead it contracts involuntarily? It is contradictory.
So how do we take a player who uses their body in the inefficient, contradictory manner and have them use themselves better?
The key lies in THE PLAYER beginning to feel when they are physically contradicting themselves. Notice the caps. You telling the player that they are contradicting themselves will do very little for them as they have still not identified it themselves. In the bending forward while pulling the head back up case, how could you have the player start to feel this contradiction without telling them they are doing it?
Here are a few suggestions:
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One of the best ways to stop hurting yourself is to learn to feel for yourself all the ways you physically contradict yourself. So whether you want to stay fit or you want your players to have good knees, hips and ankles, invest some time in learning what is going on in your body before you start playing.
Arton Baleci from floatsting.com works with professional athletes helping them upgrade their speed, agility, strength and mobility and also helps people with life-altering injuries make significant progress.
If you are a coach or parent wanting to make sure you give your children the best possible chance at developing skill levels that will help them reach their highest level possible in the game, he is delivering a seminar this summer with world renowned learning expert Dr Richard Bailey called 'The Art and Science of Learning' where you will learn how to turn cutting edge teaching and learning theories into the effective practical methods.
For more information go to floatsting.com
by Arton Baleci