Hi,

Have you noticed the time spent on injury prevention, or perhaps more accurately, reducing the risk of injury, for your child?

If your child's team is anything like any of the teams I have observed and consulted with, they are lucky if they have a 2 minute "strength circuit" as part of their warm-up.

That time-investment is minuscule for most youth players despite the fact that research quite consistently has shown that specific, structured warm-up programs lasting 10-15 minutes before every practice can reduce injuries by 30-50% (!) compared to a "standard" warm-up with jogging, stretching and some high-knees and heel-kicking.

Since most teams do some kind of warm-up anyways, it's worth asking why so few choose to implement these low-barrier-to-entry warm-ups, especially given the size of the pay-off relative to the time cost.

Now, these warm-up programs aren't perfect, don't get me wrong. The most commonly studied one is called the FIFA 11+ (https://fittoplay.org/sports/football/football/). As of now, there is no knowledge of, or really about, what in these programs is actually reducing injury risks, and how. So, the general recommendation is to complete the full program (choosing one of three difficulty levels) before every practice, and preferably before every match as well.

There is however a second, separate issue, and it's probably the real answer to why so few teams stick with these programs. Some evidence suggests that the strength exercise, the actually hard part where kids get tired, is very beneficial and may in fact be responsible for a lot of the reduction in injury risk. The problem with these strength exercises (like the lunges, the nordic hamstrings and the sideways bench or Copenhagen adduction) is that to get something positive out of them, they need to be hard. Really hard.

When doing them before practice, that makes kids tired and perform worse at practice, so naturally, a lot of teams who have attempted to implement the full warm-up programs have ditched them.

If they instead are done at the end of practice, or after getting home even, kids still get the full benefit from being stronger, while at the same time performing in the practice. Yes, that goes against the "do the full program before practice" recommendation above. But if the alternative is a coach abandoning the program altogether, this is the version that actually survives contact with a real team.

So if you are a coach, you can try moving the strength part of the injury reduction programs to the end of your sessions.

And if you are a parent, this part is actually more in your hands than the coach's. You don't need to wait for the team's warm-up to change: help your kid do these strength exercises after practices, or at home on their own (up to 3 times a week, preferably with one day's break in between), regardless of what happens at training.

Best,

Hans Martin

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