If you stay ready then you never have to get ready! An injury prevention exercise routine will help you to be ready. That will always be one of my favorite sayings because it is true. Preparation is a key to success. It does not matter what your injury history is because the truth of sports is that injuries can happen at any time to anyone. The best thing you can do for yourself is to maintain a consistent routine to help you stay healthy. We are going to go through how to go about doing that. Injury prevention is the first step to dealing with all injury.
What is a Daily Injury Prevention Exercise Routine?
The routine helps you to combat the risks of injury you currently face. The best way to improve anything in life is through daily consistency. If you need to read an entire textbook for example; the easiest way to conquer the goal is to read for half an hour every single day whether you want to or not. The daily consistency will bring you further than trying to binge on weekends.
Think of the story of the tortoise and the hare that you grew up learning about. The story is telling us an important lesson that many people actually forget. We focus too much on the hare in that story. Anyone can have quick bursts of action that don’t last.
The way most people handle injuries is by panicking and being frustrated once they get injured. Then all of a sudden injury is a number 1 priority and they will do anything to get healthy again. That is a hare mindset.
The tortoise knows better than this. The tortoise knows that injury can come at any time and since it is unpredictable the hare spends half an hour a day in preparation for victory.
The daily prehab routine is what you commit to doing daily to give yourself the best chances of not getting hurt.
Below I will go through the questions you must ask yourself and I will explain how I would answer each question.
Injury Prevention Exercise Step 1: What are common Injuries in Your Sport?
The first place to start is with sports trends that you are currently up against. For example, right now for football, you are seeing a lot of ACL injuries and concussions. You may not have had either but because of the sport you play you are at risk of these injuries.
It is important that you identify what you are at risk of. You also want to get position specific with this question.
My answer: I ran track and played football
Common Injuries:
- Rolled Ankles
- Hamstring strains
- Hip strains
- Concussions
- Foot injuries
- Shin splints
- A hernia
- Knee Injuries
injury Prevention Exercise Step 2: What are common injuries on your team?
I recently added in this question because some injuries are a direct cause of the coaching a team receives. When I was in college our entire male sprint squad had hamstring tendon issues. I could not figure out why at the time but looking back it was because of these acceleration sticks we used to do. It caused us all to reach when we were accelerating, putting a strain on the knee. I never identified this at the time but If I would have, I could have saved myself some pain.
You may not be able to get the coach to change practice but you can prepare yourself for practice by being aware of something he does that tends to cause injuries. You see how preparation works? It keeps you a step ahead in life.
Common Training Injuries
- Groin injuries
- Back pain
- Tight traps
Injury Prevention Exercise Step 3: What is your injury history?
What injuries are your Achilles heel? Here is where we start to get close and personal. The first two questions were really generic but this one is just about you. The injuries you put here will always be the priority over everything else because you are already at risk.
My Injury History
- Fractured L5
- Fractured hip
- Fractured tibia
- Pulled hamstring
- Back pain
- Shin splints
- Groin strain
Injury Prevention Exercise Step 4: How often do you get professional treatment?
Professional treatment plays a huge role in this because your massage therapist, chiropractor or PT will be able to help you more than you can at certain points. If you are not getting professional treatment, it means you are going to want to do more on your own each day.
When you have a great therapist on your side it is like a body reset. They get all of the problem areas back to normal, but then you go back to practice and games and screw them all up again. It is a never-ending process for athletes. Therapy is NOT just something you get after suffering an injury. The tortoise mindset knows that it is something you get on a regular basis.
My Treatment Schedule
- I would get treatment every other week
- If something was bothering me I would go once a week
Injury Prevention Exercise Step 5: How much time are you willing to put in per day?
The time matters because it will help you prioritize what needs to be done. I would say the three slots you have are 15 minutes, half an hour or 1 hour a day. Like I said earlier if you know that you are NOT getting treatment from a professional and you already have an injury history, you should be working closer to the hour more often.
My time allotment
I had a mix based on the time I had for each day. My goal was to always aim for spending the hour though because then I never had to feel rushed.
Injury Prevention Exercise Step 6: Will you do this at home or will you do it at school/gym?
It matters where you get this done for a few reasons. Depending on what your house is like or what your training facility is like one may be a distraction. You don’t want to be distracted when doing this. You want it to be focused and purposeful.
At the same time, you want to do it in the place where you have access to the tools you will need to treat your body. For example, if your school has a Normatec then you want to do this at school. If you own a Normatec, you want to do this at home. Maybe you come up with a mix based on what you have where.
How I Got it Done
I would do half of this right after practice and then the other half of my routine I did right before bed. The first half was more about using tools to get my body healthy. The second half consisted of stretching and I would use it to relax before bed.
Step 7: Do you need help relaxing?
If you are a more amped up person you are going to want to focus on calming yourself down. The reason is that if you are amped up too much it can actually be taxing on your nervous system. Once you are done the training you want to bring yourself back down to a normal state as quickly as you can.
How Do You Put This All Together Now
- You are going to take step 1 – 3 and you are going to list what movement you can do to help prevent an injury to that area. For example, let say you have hamstring on your list somewhere.
- Glute ham raises
- Foam Rolling
- Stretching
How Do You Put This All Together Now
- You are going to take step 1 – 3 and you are going to list what movement you can do to help prevent an injury to that area. For example, let say you have hamstring on your list somewhere
- Glute ham raises
- Foam Rolling
- Stretching
If you need some help with your injury prevention exercise routine email me [email protected] and I will help you out.
- Once you have done the above for all the injuries listed in steps 1-3, you want to now start to prioritize the injuries from most risky to least risky.
Injury Prevention Exercise Priorities
- Personal injuries 1st
- Team injuries 2nd
- Sports Injuries 3rd
For the personal injuries, you want to work on all three listed movements daily. With team injuries, you want to work on every movement at least a few times a week. For the sports injuries, you want to work on these at least once a week.
How you do this is by creating a set of routines that work into your time slots. The 15-minute time slot is focused on the personal injuries. The 30 minute includes the team injuries and lastly, the hour slot is where you get it all done. Your goal is to get it all done daily but that is not realistic for all.
Sample Routine for Injury Prevention Exercise
- 10 glute ham raises
- Eccentric groin strengthening
- 20 Bird dogs
- 20 ankle inversions with bands
- 20 ankle eversions with band
- 20 dorsiflexion with band
- Foam roll hamstrings
- Roll on softball for groin
- Foam rollback
- Form roll quads
- Psoas smash with softball
- Foam roll lower legs
- Roll feet on golf balls
- Hip stretch
- Hamstring stretch
- Groin stretch
- Calf stretch
- Tibia stretch
- Quad Stretch
This was the minimum routine that I would hit six days a week when I was in college and I knew better. For you, this will look a lot different but the point is that you figure out what you need to do stay healthy. The injury prevention exercise routine is all about you. If you ever do suffer an injury being in the prehab mode all of the time will actually make going through the tediousness of rehab that much easier. If you are going to step up to the next level as an athlete you need an injury prevention exercise routine.
KHO Health was acquired by was acquire by 9INE POINT in the summer of 2019 and is now referred to as 9INE POINT Health.
