Symptoms and Causes of Injury

What are the main factors behind the causes of injuries? How do we best address injuries and prevent them from recurring? We’re speaking on non-contact injuries/ overuse injuries.

Here at SPU we prioritize our athlete’s unique body by making sure that we’re tailoring their program to their own body’s needs. Every athlete that goes through our doors will go through an analysis that allows us to attain more information about their body’s biomechanical integrity prior to training with us. Through the analysis we’ll be able to address things such as mobility, stability, strength, and neuromuscular firing patterns with 10 fundamental movements. If the athlete is experiencing pain through a certain movement then we take them through a sub-test similar to the initial movement to better address the root cause of the pain. We tend to find high levels of symptoms and injuries with younger athletes nowadays that are involved in multiple sports year-round with little to no rest. Not giving the body time to adjust, rest and grow through those vigorous movements will eventually cause an overuse injury. Also those athletes will most likely lack either strength, stability, or even neuromuscular firing pattern awareness to prevent themselves from getting injured.

Another major factor to the causes of injuries is that athletes usually get the wrong treatment for their symptoms prior to the injury itself. There are lots of professionals on the market that tend to treat the symptoms and not the root causes of the problem. They’ll focus on strengthening the area rather than getting the athlete stronger all-around and moving better functionally. An athlete with a pulled hamstring doesn’t need more hamstring strengthening exercises, they need stronger hips/ glutes that will help better extend their hips through acceleration than having the hamstring doing the work. Same thing for a pitcher getting elbow pain from throwing. The issue isn’t the elbow, the root cause would be the scapula lacking strength and stability and not staying in place when throwing, gliding forward and transferring all the tension down to the elbows. When left unaddressed, the athlete then develops an elbow injury. 

In short, we find that athletes are not getting treated properly for their symptoms and injuries through wrong diagnosis and they’re also involved in too many activities leading to an overuse injury.

​-Coach Andy Louis