Athletes: In The Pursuit Of Being Injury Free

As most of you know i’m the mum of an 18 year old Academy Footballer, at MKDons. On Tuesday he was offered his first Professional Contract for next season. To say we are proud is an understatement. But there is also something else that i’m particularly proud of related to his performance during this current season; he’s been (almost) injury free which is almost unheard of as a professional athlete. And the “almost”? I’ll come back to that later in another blog…..

Now this is by no means an easy thing to achieve as a full time u18s footballer, when you might be doing about 7 training sessions pw as well as playing in 1-2 matches on top of that. But I believe there is a reason for this 🤭

The reason that Charlie has stayed in good condition is because of the work he does on his movement quality and how he regulates his nervous system. From a young age me and Charlie have worked together with @thestirlandapproach and to be fair to him he hasn’t needed much encouragement. He respects the work we do together and he understands how good it is for his body.

He has developed a great awareness of his moving body by understanding and working with one of the superpowers: #feedback (feedback blog coming soon) which has helped him to improve his #proprioception, which is vital as an athlete.

Having good proprioception is vital for a pro footballer because it plays a crucial role in their overall performance and injury prevention. Proprioception refers to the body’s ability to sense its position, movements, and forces acting upon it. In the context of football, it involves the awareness and control of one’s body position, balance, and movements on the field.

So all of that is important BUT there’s another element to the work we do and it’s the work we do on the #parasympathetic #nervoussystem and it’s all linked to what

I’ve talked about above.

It’s doing the exercises ‘in the moment’; it’s teaching the body how to come out of #fightorflight ; it’s about listening to the body’s responses to situations and learning to react in the right way. It’s not just about doing the stuff that footballers think is going to make them stronger, quicker, more powerful.

The key is #balance

Do the drills, work on your strength, become more powerful, improve your accuracy. BUT also know that the more efficiently your nervous system processes information, the quicker/stronger/ more powerful/more accurate/ less injury prone you will be