How To Prevent Sports Injuries (10 Ways)

To cover some fundamental bases, here are 10 tips how to improve athletic performance by preventing injuries in sports. These tips are not mutually-exclusive and all relate to one another in some way.

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1. Become Softer And Less Rigid

Softness doesn’t mean weakness. Actually, only when you’re really strong can you be soft by choice, because it requires a high degree of coordination.

Being soft will allow you to absorb force and load well. When you meet any kind of force with rigidity, it will result in problems. You have to be able to withstand variability and turbulence in your sport, in other words, work with and absorb any environmental imposition.

When you “soften” the joints, like knees, you learn to establish trust beyond standard ranges of motion, and tolerance for variability throughout the joints.

Related: The Art Of Effortless (Video)

2. Move Your Spine

Most athletes vary rarely move their spine when they train. Basic spinal movements and spinal coordinations will help you restore flexibility and coordination. Improving how you use your spine will directly enhance your athletic performance by a greater ability to generate and apply power.

You need to be able to bend, twist, and rotate freely. If you have sticking points in theses motions, you have blockages in the middle of your structure that are a liability and are hindering your performance.

3. Improve Your Coordination

Coordination is at the root of athletic development and movement development. All training (strength, mobility, agility) completely depends on how well the body is coordinated.

You need to train patterns that challenge your coordination so you are continually developing and fine-tuning how well your body works with itself.

Related: 4 Drills For Hand-Eye Coordination (Video)

4. Don’t Stretch

The best way to get more flexible and more range is using movement, not forcefully stretching. Forcefully stretching is not the mot efficient way to get more range, and can also lead to injuries very quickly.

Remember that as an athlete, you only need as much flexibility to match what you’re doing. If you become more flexible than your sport or activity requires, it can actually start to work against your performance, taking away from your explosiveness and elasticity.

5. Be Careful How You Strength Train

It’s not always better to just get stronger. Strength training is important for athletic performance, but it should never be developed in isolation. As said in tip #3, strength is one quality of athleticism that is completely dependent on a well-coordinated body.

If you are strength training in a way that develops horsepower but your body isn’t coordinated enough to handle that level of strength, the strength you’re developing will be detrimental and potentially more injurious to you.

Learn to coordinate your body better, and build strength along with that - this is how you use strength training to support athletic development. Otherwise, your strength is just going to put you at greater risk for injury.

6. Beware Of Diminishing Returns

Better is better - more is not better. Don't just assume that doing more is going to produce superior results.

When training, pay attention to how you respond to variety in load, volume, frequency, and intensity; then, base how much you train on those observations. In athletic developing programming, sometimes drastically less can produce much better results. It depends.

7. Balance Your Specialization

If you're specializing in a sport, you need to know how to balance specialization with other things so your sport of choice doesn't work against your body in the long term.

Aside from diversifying what you do aside from your sport, one way to get rid of more than 80% of issues caused by over-specialization is to ensure that while you’re playing your sport, your movement patterns and movement quality is balanced. Even if your performance is high, it doesn't mean your body is as efficient and coordinated as it can be.

8. Distinguish Discomfort Vs. Pain Vs. Injury

Discomfort, or feeling uncomfortable with something, is most often experienced when you're exposed to something new. More often than not, discomfort is good for growth. Pain is a signal telling you injury is coming. It is a good thing (if you listen to it).

Injury, while ideally avoided, can be a good thing, depending on how soon it happens. Sometimes injury is a necessary evil in order to break certain limitations or plateaus.

9. Distinguish Acute Vs. Chronic Injury

Acute injury is caused by a single event, whereas chronic injury is an issue that is persisting. With acute injuries, if you are training your body well and you can move relatively well, the more likely you will recover quickly.

Listen to chronic injury. You are never supposed to be in chronic pain, so if you have ongoing pain, this is a stark warning that something you are doing something wrong.

10. Leave Ice & Rest For The Dead

There are very few scenarios where we recommend icing and/or total rest. Ice slows down the natural injury response (inflammatory response), so by slowing down inflammation, you will slow down the recovery process.

You want your body to heal in a way that will allow you to continue to be athletic. If you heal through resting, it is likely just a matter of time before you get re-injured once you start back up in your sport.

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