Injury. It is the quickest way to stop you dead in your tracks with your fitness goals. It doesn't matter how quickly you lose weight or how many times you PR your lifts - If you get injured and lose the progress you made, it doesn't much matter what your max squat or bench press used to be. Fitness, wellness, and overall health is about longevity and sustainability. It's about being your best for as long as possible, and there are a couple ways to make this happen:

1. Be a technician when it comes to your body. Be aware of imbalances and work to correct them. Focus on your strength, balance, and proprioception and aim for symmetry in your movement patterns. Never stop working on perfecting the foundations of human movement (squat, lunge, hinge, push, pull, carry) and do not settle for sloppy form.

2. Move cautiously and don't exert yourself. If the demands you place on your body are minimal, your chances for acute injury decline.

Okay, so maybe there is only one real way. The latter is no way to live life and results in a higher rate of degradation of all systems of the body over time. So how do we become technicians of our own bodies without having the knowledge of functional anatomy, biomechanics, and the like?

Apart from studying for years about the human body and injury prevention, we can apply simple systems and programs to track and assess injury risk. Injury prevention has 3 main components that we want to track and reassess:

1. Balance/proprioception

2. Strength

3. plyometrics

Balance/Proprioception

This is your overall stability. This is the connection between your nervous system and your muscles to react, co-contract, and stabilize your joints as you move in and out of different body positions. This is your inner ear working with your eyes and muscles and nerves to make sure we stay upright with movements that challenge our stability. It's this combination of systems that has been shown to be a huge factor in injury prevention. So how do we make sure these systems are sufficient for our fitness routine and movement goals? We test. We work. We retest. Then, we rinse and repeat.

Here are a few tests I like to track to make sure that we are not only stable, but stable on both legs:

Star Excursion Test

Narrow Stance Birddog

Single Leg Hinge to March

Strength

Strength is the amount of force a given muscle has the capacity to produce. It is also the amount of force a muscle can control when being acted upon. Most muscle injury occurs in the eccentric phase of a contraction. This means the muscle is contracting while it is lengthening. Think about trying to catch a heavy box from hitting the floor as it falls off of a table. Your muscles are contracting and stretching as they are attempting to decelerate the box accelerating with gravity. Because of the nature of these injuries, most of the following tests emphasize the lowering or eccentric component of our movements.

Here are some movements I commonly look at to determine strength and neuromuscular control:

Anterior Step Down Test

Single Leg Squat

Copenhagen Plank

Plyometrics

Plyometrics are high speed and high force movements that require adequate fast twitch responses to control the force of impact. We've all seen it - athletes landing from a jump and the knee buckling. It's not a pretty site. Learning how to absorb the ground through proximal control (hip and core control) is vital in preventing injury with high intensity exercise and sport. You can have all of the strength in the world, but if your tissues are not accustomed to contracting and stabilizing quickly, you still leave yourself susceptible to injury.

Here are a few plyometric tests that assess control and stability with high force movements:

crossover hop test

Drop Jumps

Honorable Mention: Mobility

There have not been any studies to confirm that stretching and mobility prevents injury, but we have all seen the differences when we get into a good mobility routine - decreased tension, less perceived joint stiffness, and increased quality of movement to name a few. Flexibility may not correspond to decreased risk for injury, but I think it would be foolish not to consider mobility asymmetries. For example, if one ankle is much stiffer due to previous injury, it is highly likely that you will be shifting to one side in your squat. This may not be an issue at first, but over time, this asymmetrical loading pattern will lead to breakdown on one side of the body.

Here are a couple quick and easy tests to screen mobility asymmetries in the lower body:

Figure 4 mobility

Tandem Ankle Mobility

Not sure what to look for with these tests? We can help. Schedule a movement assessment to see where you stand with your durability and resistance to injury. Remember, it's not about a singular data point when it comes to fitness, it is about longevity and creating sustainable movement patterns to allow you to be healthy for as long as possible!

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