Ahhhh, another early morning where I can smell the approaching warmth of the day along with the aroma of this delightful coffee. These notes came from that morning as a reflection on watching the television and my favourite sporting events. Was it just me, or are more and more athletes competing with knee wraps and rolls of physio tape? It seems to me that more people in general are getting knee bracing from injury or surgery, and serious knee damage in high-level sport makes the news.
In my youth there were knee injuries around – often associated with contact sport or high velocity sports like skiing. It seemed that there were more male athletes injured to the point of needing big braces and zipper scar surgery. As I began to commit to higher levels of training and commitment, I realised that knee injuries could happen to anyone at any age. Both genders had higher incidence levels when there was a possibility of landing awkwardly or with collisions. And, for me at the time, it was disturbing to find out that knees were also vulnerable to damage from training and non-contact situations. As far as the medical journals and medical reporting is concerned these revelations in my knowledge bank are now old news. The prevailing sentiment from my younger days was that knee injuries were often career or activity ending. Many of them are never recorded because the athletes simply play on through or stop activity without getting that all-important medical check. The notion of having ‘bad knees’ seemed to be a label that people carried from youth to older ages.
Then I started to see that in sports like ice hockey, skiing, and football the athletes didn’t just go away…they had rehab and physio time and slowly got back into sport. Surgical techniques changed. It was a glimmer of hope in my thinking patterns that fuelled the notion that there were options for a return to high-level sport if the time was taken to rehabilitate and restore function after joint damage. Injuries are going to happen, but with joints like the knees I’d like to think that a good percentage of them can be prevented or minimised in terms of damage. This is now starting to appear in the journals as a distinct option, particularly for fatigue, faulty patterning, and imbalance factors that lead to joint overloads or displacement.
As a coach, it is heartening that knee and ankle injuries that seem to be increasingly common can be remedied to a certain extent. Of course, athletes and coaches need to realise that the rehab and physio worlds are still valuable, and those little tweaks and twinges need to be checked out by professionals and appraised rather than ignored. I feel that my coaching input over the years has benefited from master coaches who used systematised frameworks and made a distinction between technical training and being ready for it. That feature has directed the frameworks and designs used now by
Poly2Plyos.
Take a look at the illustrated exercise shown here from
Stable Able Knees 3 (059). It is not a specific sport-related skill. A braced squat with small hip circles that alter the tensions on the hips, knees, and ankles. The knees get some special work here because of their distance away from the hip-ankle axis. The
polymetric foot anchors can amplify the muscle-tendon intensities to very high levels. It is suitable for stages of return-to-play programming as well as homework for the protective aspects that need to develop in parallel with adaptations occurring from training and competitive readiness. Making sure that joint systems with all their connective tissues and crossing tendons can work to support and move at the same time, can no longer be an afterthought – it’s a necessity!
