Aaron King (00:02):

Welcome back to the modern old school training podcast. I'm Aaron King with coach Bob King as usual. And today's topic is a good one. We are talking about injury prevention and this is an important topic for a couple of different reasons. I think there are two main paths. We won't really take this one. What can you be doing for injury prevention? What is it? What is something you need to add to your program and to what are some of the misconceptions about injury prevention and why is it something that we have to be aware of? When thinking about training programs, when coaches are thinking about writing, we're thinking about identifying who is going to be your coach, or what is program you're going to adopt, what you can do, what you can't do, and all those different things. So injury prevention is the topic today. And coach King, I'm going to let you kind of jump it off because you know, there's a lot of misnomers. I'll just kind of let you run.

Coach Bob King (00:44):

Well, I'm glad we're doing this because first of all I never used that myself injury prevention is, is not accurate. I'd like to think that in our training programs, we do that. First of all, we can't measure that. We can't say that an athlete was running and jumping or doing whatever and had they not been fast and strong, they would've blown their knee. We can't say that, but we do know that well, conditioned athletes, elite athletes, junior athletes get hurt. And so my goal is not to prevent injury. It's just to offset them. And I'll explain that in a minute, but here's the, here's the catch point. If you say to a parent or an athlete, something, something, some, and injury prevention that they're going to latch onto that. And so it's not only a physical impossibility, it can be a mental mentally debilitating because we, you told me I wouldn't ever go and get hurt yesterday.

Coach Bob King (01:37):

Yesterday, a client of mine was telling me about an athlete who has had a full-ride scholarship in soccer, a female athlete, who broke a bone in her foot. And I didn't understand it, but something where he had said they came out and said, well, she won't ever play soccer again. Don't know that that's true or not. But the point is she got hurt. Soccer players are innately in shape. This, this is just one of those things. Something happened. She got her foot caught and stepped on. That has nothing to do with training. That is sports. Athletes have gotten hurt in the weight room. And it's just unfortunate that I think over the last 40 years we've had one or two just, you know, accidents, but you get hurt. And so the point from listeners is like, I will not tell anybody that I can prevent injuries.

Coach Bob King (02:24):

If I'm asked, I will say, well, I can't now all that said, we need to qualify this conversation by saying, we also can't measure how many we did offset because the athlete was quick enough to get out of the way of what had been a catastrophic injury. We can't say that you know, you can only play. We'd like to solve for X, you know, how many steps are you going to take before something happens? Right? All of my years in the pro game, in the soccer, NFL NBA, I learned several different things about athletes in their bodies. Number one, you only get one body. That's your asset. You better take care of it. Therefore, strength conditioning is vital. So that's for everybody listening to understand why should you train B, get one asset. Secondly, longevity is a key and we want to be sure and say, if we can add career years to your career in the pros, for example, that's dollars.

Coach Bob King (03:19):

Of course, the next thing is in the pros in many, many cases, it's not a matter if, if you have surgery, but when you have surgery things break, it's just the nature of sports. And I'm not just talking football because I have that background, but in soccer, in hockey, in tennis. And I had you know, one of my tennis players did something on the court in a ruptured ACL. And it's like, how did that happen? It just does. Now, all that said, in terms of injuries, we think that our strength conditioning programs and the training that we do will help you minimize the extent of the injury. We think that our strength conditioning will help you recover faster because of the groundwork and the basis you already have. And then we think that once you are in a strength conditioning program, it's effective, your return to the game will be quicker.

Aaron King (04:14):

All right? So we are streaming this live on YouTube. So if you guys are watching, if you have questions, we're going to be doing more of this for a little Q and an as they come up. So guys, if you have any questions, get them in. So, you know, that's the thing. So you have an athlete that might Terry cl and you know, you see some of these guys on the field, I'll use a Sean, Lee's an example in the NFL for the Dallas Cowboys. That guy probably trains as hard as anyone, right? And he has every resource, but the guy can't stay healthy. Whereas you have other guys like a Frank Gore in the NFL who has been, won't go away. Ray Lewis, just, you think of guys who are unbreakable. And so sometimes there's that genetic predisposition that plays a big factor in your vision.

Aaron King (04:53):

And I think when it comes to talking about soccer, the conditioning element, if you, I think I'm gonna go backward actually. And talk about that first point where there's kind of two ways we want to talk with the podcast is one the things you can do, but with injury prevention, I think that there is such a buzz word around it. A lot of coaches already are they not already, they have to use it in their methodology, in their training to sell. And I think that any coach that is good and is doing those things already, it's injury prevention is baked into their program because they're doing all the things that they know an athlete needs from a company,

Coach Bob King (05:29):

As long as you understand it and understand the context. I'm not, you know, I'm not saying it's not possible. I just don't know how to measure it. And then when it, when an injury occurs, then you didn't prevent it. But there is a degree of, of, of truth to the matter where I'm not going to be hurt as much because I can almost guarantee you, if you're out of shape your weak, you're probably going to get hurt. So the antithesis is to get in shape, get strong, you won't hurt. And then volume. I mean, you just start, you run so much, you lift so much, you play so much, the volume was going to where the body down.

Aaron King (06:05):

So what does that balance? So for looking at the volume of strength, speed conditioning, but then you start looking at some of the traditional what you would categorize as prehab pre those injury, preventative type things. I, you know, those are the things that we do anyway with cuff and stuff. And it's just a part of that, you know, keeping attendance and everything, and just trying to,

Coach Bob King (06:28):

Well, w where we're going, where we're going is what you just finished with is the smaller muscles. You're only as strong as your weakest link. And so what happens is in all of a sudden, you just in weight training of the certain lifts, like deadlifts and the power cleans and the bench press, you really have to take care of your rotator cuff. Right? It seemed like when I was coaching football, my linebackers tended to have the most shoulder damage cause they would go up in there and stuff, the hole. And if that rotator cuff not strong, it's going to move that shoulder joint around. Right. So prehab, you know, I don't want to be picky on everything except for almost anticipates injury because rehab is coming back. And so, as you mentioned, we in our program do cuff and stuff, which allows you to handle all the areas that could be the weak link in the chain, rotator, cuff flexibility core just certain areas where you think you're most stressed. I know baseball, tennis is real sensitive to that rotator cuff, of course, but everybody needs

Aaron King (07:27):

It's. And there's a big element of what not to do is as important as what to do. And so when we talk about adding the rotator cuff and the myofascial and those, those little modalities, but, you know, I go back to my playing days where I was a long snapper. And so for me, I was always taken care of my, yeah, my lateral. Epicondyle making sure that L you know, the elbow stayed intact. And that was a major problem for my career because I trained like a linebacker or a safety, but I built up a lot of tendonitis through that motion. So by backing off of the Olympics and the catches, it really helped me with my just longevity in the sense of everything I did on the preventative side, preventative actually had more of an effect because I was having to recover from less stress in the weight room. So by scaling down,

Coach Bob King (08:15):

That's, I think you just really summarized all the aspects of training very well, because very, simply more is not better. And I don't know of really a male that's ever come in the weight room who hadn't has said I can do more. We don't. What we find over time is once your body's been exposed to stress it programs in. And so we did this several times during our summer program where we rotated the stressors. And so what we ended up doing, I just, I didn't really think I was taking a gamble, but I did the Olympics once a week. We would do whatever combinations we had, the power cleans, hang cleans front into a push press. Those kinds of things, because we're doing bench press, we're doing back squats, we're doing other exercises that, that highlight those muscles that are used in the Olympics.

Coach Bob King (09:05):

So the body already gets the neuromuscular kind of you to know, conditioning for it and the training for it. So what we're going to do is pull back on that stress. We cannot let the weight room be a source of injuries, because it's just, when do you ever recover? So we're going to lift, recover, lift, recover, instead of just grinding, grind, grind. And so we rotate everything in and out. We call it cuffing stuff because the list is so long. So I'm going to use a random number of 10. If we have 10, which we have more than we have 10 things we can do in cuff and stuff, let's say we do five. And then next time we take off two and add three and do six. And then we add, and we rotate them in and out because the body is familiar with it and respond quickly.

Coach Bob King (09:48):

If you're coming off an injury, we recondition. If you're coming new into training, we do more volume because we have to imprint that into the, into the nervous system in the muscle. So once you're a veteran athlete, now, when I say veteran, in terms of training, I taught a year. I mean, we, we think 366 days is magic. And so once you get into our program, maybe go off to school and come back a year later, you're really into it now. And the body's familiar with, it's got all the queue set. And so all these things that we've been trying to do, we can't do everything. Every workout you don't have to. So we don't let the weight room become a source of cumulated stress that can lead to injury.

Aaron King (10:26):

So going off of that now you know, with, with the injury prevention, we usually think of those, the soft tissue injuries or the role of ankles and things like that, which some are preventable in the sense of the conditioning element. But some are just if you get someone landing on you and then there's not much you can do, but what does high speed training? Let's talk about that. So, you know, I see a lot of spring training and those fall camps, they kick off that you'll have hamstrings, you'll have low backs, you'll have these things where you can tell that the high-speed conditioning or the high speed, and that might not have been incorporated.

Coach Bob King (11:04):

Right. Thank imbalance. If you want to prevent injury in a real sense, be balanced. And so if you're some programs I've seen visiting high schools and stuff, and they'll have their whiteboard workouts on there. And it just depends that the coach may just be in love with a quad work. We're going to squat, and then we're going to deadlift and we're going to like extend. And it's like I'm looking for the hamstrings in here somewhere, and I don't see it. So there's an imbalance and I was, I was coaching in a school where that was the problem I came in. And he was you know, powerlifting was going to make the program in make the football program stronger. Nope, no pun intended because it did. I was the track coach and I was having to deal with hamstring pools. It's like, guys, you know, let's pull back. So we have short strides and pull hamstrings. So squatting is not more, is not better.

Aaron King (11:55):

Again, guys, if you have any questions on YouTube, we only have a few more minutes before we are done with this episode. So if you have any questions, get them in. Obviously, we're going to have this recorded. It'll be on YouTube. It'll be on SoundCloud, we'll be on iTunes. So you can find this podcast on those places, but we're gonna do more live streams. So if you have a question on YouTube guys, put it down in those comments. So I keep looking down, I'm looking for those comments right now. Okay. So what's kind of a, I don't want to say like 10 commandments because that list is a little bit longer. What are a few tips that you can give folks to take with them? If they do want to at least incorporate something. If they're, if they're trying to be, cause, you know, we say that if you're doing a comprehensive training program, the injury prevention is baked in, but if you're not doing the program, what is something that you shouldn't, you know?

Coach Bob King (12:42):

Yeah. What you want to think of is consistency, number one, I did it, so I'm good. Not, not for a month, but you know, each time. And so I think the thing to remember is the connectors. So for example, we talk about the, your, your abdominals, or your core is the connector between the upper and lower body. Keep it strong. The rotator cuff is, is the connector between the torso and the limb. So keep those things in mind because they're not extra they're part of, and it's they're not accessories. They're part of, so the things that we're talking about in a cuff and stuff, or hope to prevent is, is the prevention part of it comes in the fact that, well, if you had done it, you probably would have missed that injury. Right. You know, I just wore out my shoulder. Yeah. It was weak because of the rotator cuff and you get an orthopedic exam and they say, you need to strengthen your rotator cuff. Well, that's on you. So negligence is probably the biggest. Our adherence is really the biggest flaw in people's minds about how to sustain their programs and ward off injuries. We'll call it, call it

Aaron King (13:47):

All right. You heard it. So if you have any questions again, I'm going to try to buy some time for you here in these last few seconds. But if you want some training programs the KingSportsTraining.com is where coach King is writing everything. And of course, you can train with him in Dallas, Texas, if you are in the area just create a free account at KingSportsTraining.com You chat there, but we have training programs there. We send out speed daily every week. So you can get all of that with the training programs and different offers that are coming out. But other than that, we're just going to be here making more, more information. If you have questions, if you still, in fact, if you have a question, leave it below. So just because you didn't get to it live, leave it below. We'll get to it next time, just on the bottom and we'll even answer it just typing if we can as well. Which we obviously can. So leave your questions. You can follow me @DeepSnap on Twitter and Instagram. Ask questions there. Coach Kings on Twitter and Instagram as @CoachBobKing again,  but any final words, anything I left out before we sign off?

Coach Bob King (14:47):

Not at all, but just train hard, train smart. All right. You heard it. So I will talk to you next time