I haven’t published much strength and conditioning randomness of late, so here goes.

1. Here’s a research study that demonstrates relationships among a variety of scheduling and recovery factors and injury rates.  The part I found most interesting was that researchers observed that sleeping fewer than six hours the night prior to a competition led to a significant increase in fatigue related injuries.

Additionally, while it wasn’t specifically observed in the study, my anecdotal observations are that kids who play 14 games in a weekend are more likely to hate their sports, have too many insignificant trophies, and live in their parents’ basement until age 35 because they have a weird sense of entitlement and absolutely no idea how to interact on a social level with anyone who isn’t on their AAU teams.

2. Speaking of young athletes, interval training works better for them, too.  There’s absolutely no reason for a young soccer player to be running miles and miles at a steady-state.  Kids need to get strong and learn to run fast before they try to run fast for a long time.  Interval training is a nice “bridge” between the two when applied correctly during the off-season period.

3. Here’s an excellent study with a biomechanical analysis of the hex/trap bar deadlift technique as compared to the conventional deadlift technique.  It backs up a lot of the comments I made last month with my deadlift series from last month, which you can find at the following links:

How to Deadlift: Which Variation is Right for You? – Part 1 (Conventional Deadlift)
How to Deadlift: Which Variation is Right for You? – Part 2 (Sumo Deadlift)
How to Deadlift: Which Variation is Right for You? – Part 3 (Trap Bar Deadlift)

4. Here’s an interesting article in Radiology Today about the use of MRI in college athletes as a pre-screening tool – and potentially even an aid in optimizing strength and conditioning programs.

Because a lot of the observations on MRI may be “subclinical” (meaning they are findings that occur without the presence of symptoms), there may be merit (albeit at a big cost) to using screens like this as part of an initial (or on the fly) evaluation of an athlete to dictate a training or “prehab” program.  For instance, observing a subclinical patellar tendinopathy may mean you do more soft tissue work around the knee and more heavily emphasize glute activation and minimize quad dominant squatting (among other things) to keep that tendon from reaching a symptomatic threshold.

There are, of course, some significant drawbacks.  For starters, MRIs are expensive and time consuming, so not everyone could get them.  How do you decide who deserves it – especially in the era of Title IX?

Second, you’re assuming that strength and conditioning coaches are qualified and capable to organize programs around what’s found on a radiology report.  Generally speaking, there isn’t a ton of individualization in collegiate strength and conditioning because coaches have so many athletes assigned to them and it isn’t feasible.  It makes me wonder if you could prevent more injuries if you simply hired 3-4 more strength and conditioning coaches for what it would cost you to get an extra radiologist and imaging technician.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, there are a lot of “false positives” on MRI.  I’ve written about this quite in the past and covered it in our Optimal Shoulder Performance DVD set, but you are headed down a very slippery slope when you start treating the image rather than the athlete.  In other words, how one moves and feels is far more important than how one’s MRI looks.  I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of my overhead throwing athletes have labral fraying, partial thickness supraspinatus tears, and a host of other “normal” findings for this population.  If I immediately contraindicated a ton of exercises in my program because I knew this, I’d likely be setting them back with regressions in their programming when they actually needed progressions.

What are your thoughts on this final issue?  If you had the resources, would you MRI every athlete in a college athletic program?  How would you pick which region to MRI?

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