It can be difficult to predict injury but providing an athlete with the tools, through movement and by encouraging lifestyle changes to prevent metabolic conditions, is common in the medical world. Even physical therapy itself was created for treating injuries, not preventing them. We need to go beyond improving the health of our patients and athletes. Because physical therapists often spend extensive time with their patients compared to other medical professionals, it provides an opportunity to discuss prevention and minimize any injuries or procedures in the future. So how do you predict an injury before it happens? 

“Web of Determinants” 

Like many things in life, there is no black and white when it comes to athletics. Many factors can contribute to an injury, so we need to get the whole picture before creating a plan for prevention going forward. To do this we want to create a “web”, obtaining as much information as possible on factors that could have led up to the injury. Some important factors to collect for this web would include your training volume and frequency, if you’re training for multiple sports, nutrition, hydration, sleep, and stress. Think about these questions: Has anything changed recently? Am I overextending myself in one or more of these areas? From there, we can try to determine which parts of the web contributed to the injury. 

Predict to Prevent

If you’re an athlete, your preseason screening only gives you one datapoint in time. If just one day is being documented and an injury occurs later in the season, you’ll have a limited scope on what could have caused it. Even more importantly, the factors that you see from your preseason testing may not be related to the injury at all. For injury prevention, we need to properly predict the factors contributing to it. Rather than just one snapshot in time that the screening provides, we want your prediction to mimic that of a weather model. Take essential factors such as sleep, steps, training volume, hydration, stress and measure them every single day. Frequency and quantity of data points is the key here. If you measure these factors in your life consistently you should be able to see trends over time. Then if you’re at a high-risk point in several of these areas, you’ll be aware of the increased possibility of injury if you overdo it. And if the injury has already occurred, you can evaluate and modify those contributing factors of your life to decrease your risk. 

Predicting injuries doesn’t have to be a guessing game. Catch them before they happen. To hear more about preventing injuries, listen to Episode 121 – How to Predict Injury of our podcast, Training Room Talk.