are you easily injured?

My #1 priority at the gym is to try to minimize the number of injuries.

There’s no use training hard, conditioning hard … and then missing 3 weeks of training due to injury.

Far smarter is to avoid the injury in the first place.

Yet today I had a girl come to gym on crutches. She had injured a toe doing seat drop on trampoline. (Don’t ask me how.)

Another gymnast is out having hurt her knee jumping up on to a height during conditioning. (She missed the landing, and “bumped” the knee on the way down.)

From the NY Times:

… “I think that there is a general quality of ‘heartiness’, or ‘robustness,’ that may influence who gets hurt and who doesn’t,” said Carl Foster, director of the human performance laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. “I’ve never seen any systematically collected data, and I’m not even sure what one would measure, but anyone who has worked with athletes for any time at all has seen that there are just some people who are fragile and some who aren’t.” …

Clues to Help Explain the Frequency of Injuries

Myself, as an athlete, am not easily injured. Good genes? I’m also smart. And careful.

Seems to me that predisposition to injury is both genetic. And determined by how intelligently you coach your athletes. How smart you train. The quality of your gym.

Some injuries ARE avoidable.

(via Outside)

hmmm – larger original – flickr