“Every non-traumatic (non-contact) injury is preventable”

I didn’t say it.

Shirley Sahrmann said it.

Other than contact-based injuries, all other injuries are preventable.

A lot of people believe that injuries happen because you did “something wrong”.  Although they’re not completely wrong, that thing that you did wrong is not at the source of the injury.

Let me explain…

Injuries originate from something going wrong in your body, whether it’s a dysfunctional movement pattern, an asymmetry, a structural problem, or just an overuse of the tissues or the joints.

If you move like this, and end tearing your ACL it’s not because of ONE THING you did wrong

Any movement that you do that affects the area of dysfunction adds a little more stress to the joint or tissue in question, or often times on a different area of the body that’s trying to compensate for that said dysfunction.  Every time you train, practice, play your sport or do any activity, it adds a little more insult to the joint or tissue in question.

As my good friend Kevin Neeld would say, you can think of it as drops of water in a bucket- the bucket being your injury threshold.  If you’re carrying a dysfunction, any activity or movement is going to be another drop of water in the bucket.  At the very moment you’re doing something wrong, or not moving the right way it’s not going to hurt you; just like one drop of water in a bucket won’t do anything.  But what happens if you keep adding more and more drops of water over the weeks, months and even years? Well, depending on how big your bucket is (which is different for everyone), eventually water will spill.  That’s when you cross the injury threshold and actually get hurt!

The dysfunction has been there the whole time, but because you didn’t do anything about it, wear and tear just accumulated until the joint or the tissue being stressed just gave out.

That’s why injury prevention strategies are so important.  And that’s why assessing for limitations and asymmetries is even more important.  You want to identify the potential issues early on.

You don’t want to just let the water drops accumulate until it’s too late.

To know more about injury prevention strategies for the shoulders, just enter your info below and I’ll send you my special report on the topic…and best of all it’s totally FREE!

I’ve been blogging quite a bit recently about the FMS and the importance of screening for dysfunctional movement patterns, and fixing them.  As I’ve mentioned before, the FMS is probably the easiest tool in that regard because it gives an easy-to-follow, step-by-step assessment where you can easily score your athletes and fix the faulty movement pattern by applying the appropriate corrective exercises.  After a week or two of corrective strategies, you re-screen and see if they improved.

But what if the corrections don’t fix your athlete or client?  There might be a couple different reasons for that.  The 3 most common would be:

• Inappropriate corrective exercise selection
• Incorrect or faulty performance of the corrective exercises
• Incorrect scoring from the evaluator of the athlete or client

These should be the top 3 reasons to be considered if a movement pattern doesn’t improve.  Sometimes however, the athlete will be screened correctly, given the right corrective exercises and they’ll perform them properly, but the assessment result will still tell you that the movement pattern didn’t improve.  How is that possible?

One thing to consider is the recruitment patterns during high threshold activities.  Let me explain…

A dysfunctional movement pattern may arise from a mobility (or flexibility) problem, a stability problem, or a motor control dysfunction.  In any of these cases your body has engrained some motor patterns when you move, whether it is when you run, jump, walk, lift weights, etc.  The functional movement assessment will allow to get rid of those compensation patterns.

Anyone surprised that I found this image on a Crossfit website?

But if you keep pushing your body to the limit (high threshold activities) while trying to correct a dysfunctional movement pattern, you might be wasting your time.  Your body will always follow the path of least resistance when confronted to a high threshold or max effort activity, which is where the dysfunction will keep being encouraged.  If you’re trying to re-train a movement pattern, it’s not a good idea to train in that max effort zone, especially with conflicting movement patterns.  You’re not giving your body a chance to adjust and get used to the new movement pattern you’re trying to improve.  Your body will always get back to what’s easier when facing a high demand task.

That’s why it’s smart, even necessary, to back off the training intensity for a little bit while you re-train a correct movement pattern.  After a week or two you can start reinforcing that new, more efficient movement pattern with lifting exercises and progressive loads, and higher demand activities, because let’s face it: your body will keep facing high threshold demands in training, sports and in everyday life.  But it is important to gradually return to that point if you want to maintain the effect of the corrective work you’ve been doing.  It doesn’t mean discontinuing all activities and training to focus solely on corrective exercises.  It just means to avoid conflicting movement patterns (someone should avoid heavy squatting for a while if he’s trying to correct his deep squat pattern, or avoid max effort bench pressing if trying to improve shoulder mobility).  It’s just about being smart about it, and knowing what exercises or activities could impair your corrective strategy efforts, and lowering the intensity or removing them from your routine for a couple of weeks while you fix your dysfunctional movement patterns.

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