Injury prevention strategies are an important part of a strength and conditioning program.  How important is it to get bigger, faster, stronger and more powerful if you’re sidelined with a preventable injury?  Not that important I would think…

But when including injury prevention strategies in your program or the ones of your athletes, you can face a couple challenges, mainly:

• how exactly to program those injury prevention strategies in your training
• how to not completely turn your training program into a rehab program
• not make your athletes feel like patients
• how to maintain a training effect while still working on injury prevention

Not Exactly how you want to make your athletes feel like

These are legitimate concerns in my opinion because there is a fine line between too much and too little corrective exercises.  And it’s also not easy to know where to include them in your program so you still end up with an optimal result, both from from an exercise prescription and a time management perspective.  Here are a couple of tips to help you program your corrective exercises better into your own program or the ones of your athletes.

1. Your warm up.  There is a decent amount of injury prevention strategies that can be included in your warm up, especially if they’re mobility exercises.  A warm up is the perfect time to work on soft-tissue restriction and mobility to improve range of motion.  And you’re going to use your lifting to reinforce that new found mobility with appropriate lifting exercises.

Your warm up should be a little more specific than that…

2. Your cool down.  Soft-tissue work and static stretching are great to include at the end of your training session.  It will promote recovery and limit the possible range of motion loss from tight muscles.

3. Fillers.  This is probably my favorite way to include injury prevention strategies in a training program.  Fillers are basically a corrective exercise that you include between sets of a lifting exercise.  It can help reinforce a movement pattern of your main lifting exercise, it can be a stability exercise or it can be a mobility exercise that doesn’t affect the part(s) of your body you’re training.  The reason I like fillers so much is because from a time efficiency perspective, it really doesn’t get any better.  It saves time so yo don’t have to do all of that corrective work at the beginning or at the end of your training, which would make your session time longer by at least 10-20 minutes.  It also makes your training more productive; you spend less time (if at all, when programed thoroughly) waiting and doing nothing between your sets of your main exercises.  This is something very common among most gym enthusiasts; they spend an awful lot of time doing nothing (most of the time talking, and losing focus) between their working sets.  No wonder why most people hate going to the gym and lifting weights!  I would hate training too if I had to wait 1-2 minutes between every single set of every exercise I’m doing; this is boring as hell!  Putting fillers in between your sets makes you move more, reduces your down time between sets, and makes you feel like your training was much more productive and that you got a lot more done in the same amount of time.  And you took care of the injury prevention side of things on top of that!

Here’s what a hypothetical upper body day could look like with the use of filler sets if we wanted to include shoulder injury prevention strategies (filler exercises are highlighted in green) :

Notice that you’d still get a decent training effect from the rest of the exercises while simultaneously working on lower trap and serratus anterior activation, t-spine mobility, breathing patterns and anterior chain muscles extensibility, which all play an important role in injury prevention for the shoulders.

As I mentioned above, fillers can be a tremendous addition in your training program.  Give it a shot and play around with your corrective exercises that you want to include in your program.  As long as your filler exercise doesn’t interfere with your main exercise, you should be fine.  But you might need some time to play around and find good combinations that will work for you.

If you want to learn more about injury prevention strategies for the shoulders, enter your info below and get a FREE report on the shoulders!