The Prevention Paradox
Take home message
THE BETTER JOB WE DO AT PREVENTING SOMETHING,
THE LESS EVIDENCE THERE IS THAT IT EVER NEEDED PREVENTING.
For Coaches
Prevention is better than cure.
For Athletes
Maintain diligence even in good times.
The paradox of prevention. I heard it on a podcast about the pandemic and public health: “the better job we do of preventing something, the less evidence there is that it ever needed preventing.” A fascinating concept.
That sums up injury prevention right there. As a clever colleague of mine said to me many years ago, we never keep the stats of the number of injuries we saved, just the ones we missed.
Sport at any level is fraught with acceptable risk and danger. As a strength and conditioning coach, my approach, my first priority is to make sure the coaches have a full squad to choose from. My priority is not enhanced fitness, speed, power or some agility complex. It’s as simple as ensuring as many players training and improving in their chosen sport as possible. Now, an easy way to achieve that is to not train very hard and then there’s little risk of getting hurt. Little risk of success too, so training softly is not an option. You have to train cleverly.
Photo by Sean Horsburgh on Unsplash
We instigated a few routines and exercises several years ago, that I am sure the player group could say are part of the monotonous daily training routine. We have been doing them so long, they may possibly have forgotten why they are doing them. In fact, there are actually a couple of players that come to mind that have tedious exercise routines that they know they will stop doing when they stop playing. Until then, they will continue to do them. One or two players have from time to time, suffered a mishap because they stopped the uninteresting routine because they “were feeling good”. Sort of like, “I wasn’t sick, so I stopped washing my hands”, kind of rationale.
There are long-held injury prevention strategies to reduce risk, but not eliminate risk. One of those is diligence in preparation, even when it is going well. Maintain proper warm-up and cool down strategies. Well placed injury prevention exercises in the gym. A hard job for any coach is to keep players in these routines of performing practices when little evidence exists that it is still worth doing. But it’s worth than proving otherwise!
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Thanks again. BA.