Sports Injury Science Webinar Series

It is important as practitioners that we appreciate that injuries will occur in sport, regardless of what measures are put in place. The reason for this inherent injury risk is biomechanical and physiological demands that sport places upon the body, often for prolonged time periods under fatigue conditions. Furthermore, sport is very chaotic in nature, with many in-control variables that can increase the risk of injury including collisions, unplanned directional changes in reaction to a competitive stimulus, ambient temperatures, defensive manoeuvres, attacking manoeuvres, etc.

It is also important that strength and conditioning practitioners understand that an increase in athlete performance by default prevents injuries an athletes by creating a robustness to injury. A stronger athlete is able to absorb landing forces more efficiently by a co-contraction of the local joint muscularity, therefore distributing the mechanical load across the musculotendinous tissue (Holmes and Delahunt, 2009) . An athlete with an adequate concentric quadriceps to eccentric hamstring ratio will be able to effectively reduce shearing forces at the patella tendon upon landing by creating a posterior force upon the knee via an eccentric co-contraction at the hamstrings, etc. (Myer et al, 2008). Therefore, the aim of this short course is to provide coaches with a greater understanding of the epidemiology of many common sport injuries, and what we can do as coaches to help prevent such injuries.