As we start a new academic year, pupils return to school with fresh focus, goals and aspirations for the next phase of their education. This is especially true with school sport. Pupils may aspire to play in the ‘A’ side for their sport, represent their region or nation, or they may just want to have fun playing with their friends. In any of these contexts’ pupils are thrown back into a full school sports programme week one, with no hint of a ‘preseason’ to allow their developing bodies to become accustom to the demands of a school sports programme. Therein lies the problem, with no time to prepare who will ultimately succumb to an injury in the first 3-4 weeks of the school term?
I liken this situation to exams at the end of the year. Countless hours of preparation are put in to ensure pupils are prepared for the syllabus and can cope with the demands of the exam without falling at the first hurdle. We would not dream to send pupils into an exam hall without the prerequisite knowledge to make them robust enough to cope with the exam and achieve their highest potential. So why do we do this in school sport? Where ultimately the price of not being prepared can be injury?
There have been numerous of studies into how preparation leads to injury prevention, or injury risk reduction. The idea of being able to prevent an injury is attractive to sports people, coaches and support staff alike. The cost of injury is not only financial but also the long term physical, mental and emotional effects could potentially change the path of a pupil’s trajectory. We can never truly prevent an injury occurring, but we can influence and modify some of the risk factors (intrinsic and extrinsic), in order to mitigate the risk and reduce the likelihood of that factor playing a part in injury.
This is where preparation come into its own. Preparation can be both physical and mental in nature. Physically we now understand that ‘fitness’ (your physical loading over a period greater than 4 weeks), can be protective when you are subjected to high levels of fatigue (acute load). This idea has been researched and popularized in sports science from the work of Dr Tim Gabbett, a sports scientist from Australia. His original paper opened a door to professionals being able to monitor a person’s loading and make judgements if this person was at risk of developing an injury. We now know that this formula is highly specific to sport, team, person, age, gender, etc. Therefore, it makes its application on mass, data heavy, and logistically difficult to administer. However, we cannot dispute that ‘fitness’ is a factor in injury risk reduction.
We notice the potential influence of bouts of heavy acute loading vs limited fitness, within our School’s injury stats. We see a spike in acute injury (presenting to the physio clinic for triage) at the start of a term after a longer holiday (Summer, Christmas, Easter). Could this be due to a reduced period of chronic loading, leading to reduced fitness and then injuries occurring with the bodies inability to cope with the repeated bouts of high acute loading (high fatigue)? At this stage we do not know, unless we have a detailed individualized profile of each pupil, and then we still would not be able to account for chance (the bad tackle, the slip-on wet ground etc.). Then there is the deeper question of how fit is fit enough? We would need to build up a sports specific profile of physical demands (fitness being one of them) in order to answer this question. This is something we are also working on at Millfield. If we can understand the demands of an U16’s rugby match or U14’s netball, we can then begin to make recommendations about how ‘fit’ a pupil needs to be in order to cope with the demand of their sport.
As support staff all we can do is try to help our pupils become better accustom to the demands of their sport therefore, modifying one risk factor in their own personal injury risk profile, helping to mitigate one element of injury risk. As technology advances we may be able to begin to unpick the individual injury risk profile for each pupil, maximizing their time playing the sports they enjoy and mitigating the cost of injury as much as possible. What is your Approach to Preparing Young People for Sport?
Millfield Institute of Sport and Wellbeing 