What Injury Prevention Really Looks Like: Proactive Approaches to Keep You Out of Rehab

I’m sure you’ve heard that injuries are an inevitable part of sport. I heard it repeatedly when I first started working as a strength and conditioning coach.

When the Toronto Maple Leafs hired me to reimagine their approach to Human Performance I set out to challenge this conventional narrative by assembling a team of experts from across the spectrum of human performance to systematically eliminate the biggest injury challenges that athletes face. This team came together to identify the major risk factors for injury and built a complex system of monitoring and interventions that allowed us to go three and a half years with ZERO non-contact injuries, while setting franchise records for the number of players participating in all 82 games of the regular season!

This model worked in the NBA, NHL, & MLS and now it can work for you! Here is an inside look at how we did it.

Collect Data: Your Personal Health Dashboard

We used longitudinal data collection as the key to understanding and preventing injuries. What this means is measuring key metrics regularly over time, allowing us to understand, firstly, is there any susceptibility to injury in the present moment, and secondly, to build a picture over time of what is ‘normal’ for each individual. This is important as injuries are so complex and individual. Over time, when you see a deviation from your own norm you can create a targeted intervention without having to rely on a marker like physical pain to guide you. Think of it as your personal health dashboard, giving you insights to tailor your training and lifestyle choices effectively.

So what are the important areas to collect data on?

Muscular Strength: Your Body’s Armor

We found muscular strength to be the most important factor in an athlete getting hurt! Companies like KangaTech , and VALD Performance are democratizing advanced muscular testing to make it available outside pro sport for the first time. Measuring side to side symmetry, strength relative to your body weight, and balance on either side of a joint gives you a road map to a training program that is totally unique and individualized to you so that you get the biggest bang for your buck!

A strength training program that progressively works to correct any weaknesses found will allow you to reduce joint pain and prevent muscle injuries like strains and tears. It's not just about building muscle; it's about creating a robust support system for your joints and improving overall body mechanics; It protects your tendons from painful tendinopathies and ruptures; It creates balance around your joints to prevent one muscle group from overpowering another when you perform explosive movements. As an added bonus, strength training also improves your bone mineral density, helping to offset your risk of fractures as you age!

Proactive Physical Therapy: An Ounce of Prevention

Regularly checking in with a PT means not waiting for pain or injury before seeking treatment. There are many things that might come up with your body that your training program cannot address. Proactively checking in with a physical therapist is about regular check-ins and tune-ups for markers that they are tracking over time that can be predictive of future injury. If your PT notices that, for example, you are losing internal rotation at your hip over time, they can use targeted manual therapy techniques to restore range of motion and ward off a whole host of potential problems before you ever felt there was an issue. It’s an investment in your musculoskeletal health that can be a game-changer in keeping you injury-free.

Nutrition: The Fuel for Recovery

Nutrition plays a starring role in injury prevention. Food is quite literally what your body is built out of and so it pays to make sure that you are built out of the highest quality materials possible! Often, nutrition dictates the quality of the outcomes from your strength training and physical therapy discussed above. Fueling your body properly allows you to work harder for longer, producing bigger gains! It also reduces fatigue while training or competing, offsetting the risk of injury that comes from being fatigued.?

A balanced diet rich in anti-inflammatory foods, carbohydrates, and proteins can speed up recovery too. They support muscle repair, reduce inflammation, restock your energy stores (glycogen), and strengthen bones.?

Get help with your nutrition with the experts at Fuelin and then you can measure your progress through regular blood work with companies like InsideTracker .

Sleep: The Most Powerful Performance Enhancer Known to Man!

Like nutrition, sleep is a cornerstone habit that enhances the outcomes of all areas mentioned above. Every intervention that you put in place to enhance your physical and mental wellbeing will be improved by quality sleep. In fact, there is not a single facet of human performance (physical or cognitive) that has been measured that is not improved by sleep! Research has shown that poor sleep significantly increases the risk of injury in athletes.

The basics of sleep hygiene are critical here. Reduce your use of electronics an hour before bed, make sure that your bedroom is dark, cold (~65F), and quiet. Build a routine around sleep, aiming to go to bed and get up at around the same time every day as this will establish the routine in your body and significantly improve your sleep. Try to get as much bright, natural light as possible during the day as this will support optimal circadian rhythms.

To track my sleep I have used WHOOP , ōURA , and most recently, and with the most depth and expertise at their disposal, Somnology .

Load Management: The Art of Balancing Act

Oh boy. This will be a separate post soon so I will try to keep this short. Tim Gabbett and I have had many good rants about this one! Load management is often explained as resting to ensure that you are fresh to perform. It ABSOLUTELY is not. In fact it is this exact belief that is leading to an increase in injuries in sport!

Load management is actually the art of preparing the body to withstand the demands of the activity that you are going to participate in. Load is simply the amount of work (stress) that you put on the body. When you put more load on the body than it is prepared for, you are at a higher risk of injury. Therefore, if we train really hard, spend time with the PT every week, eat really well, and sleep like a champion we will have the capacity to withstand very high loads. If we overemphasize rest, we will not have the capacity to withstand high load.

Think about tracking load for the activities that you participate in either by rating how hard it was from 1-10 and multiplying that by the time you spent performing the activity. You can also use a tracker like Garmin or 苹果 watch if you have one. Stay tuned for a more detailed article on this topic.

Conclusion

What makes data collection so important is that it gives us an objective picture of our current level of preparedness to meet the demands of the activity that we want to participate in. We then have a precise roadmap that tells us the safest and most efficient way to get us to the goal that we have set for ourselves. This roadmap is also how we can bulletproof ourselves against injury! If we regularly retest ourselves in the same metrics, we can continually reshape our programs to ensure that they change as we change.

Injury prevention isn’t just about avoiding the bad; it’s about promoting the good. By focusing on data collection, strength training, proactive physical therapy, nutrition, sleep and load management, you’re not just dodging injuries; you’re enhancing your overall health and performance. Adopt these proactive approaches, and keep yourself out of rehab and at the top of your game.