How to prevent sports injuries before they happen AND sustain peak performance?
‘Treatment for Sports Injury’ and ‘Training for Performance’ are often considered as two entirely separate things. I am here to tell you that they aren’t. It is possible for you to achieve both goals (pain avoidance and performance improvement) with ONE practice.
Today I am going to talk about ONE piece of this practice that I have honed with my clients over the last 5 years.
Why traditional Sports injury treatment isn’t enough
Most athletes rely on a familiar formula: endurance training, cross-training, and solid nutrition. And when sports injury happens, the formula looks like this: X-ray → MRI → specialist → a few weeks of physical therapy. There are some stray thoughts about ‘technique’ but these revolve around equipment and body alignment basics.
The bottom line?
There are very few in-depth resources that teach athletes how to master whole-body movement mechanics in a way that prevents sports injury and improves sports performance at the same time.
And this is where most sports injury treatment falls short.
The missing link between sports performance and injury prevention
If you’re looking for a step change in athletic performance and a way to avoid recurring sports injuries, you need to learn how to use your joints proportionate to their capability, large joints do the large work and small joints do less work. When you know how to recruit the large joints (the pelvis, hip joints) with your body movement, you create maximum power with little effort. When smaller joints have to do a disproportionate amount of work while others are checked out or locked up, they start to experience wear and tear.
This wear and tear accumulates over time and becomes the root cause of:
chronic back pain from squatting
hip pain during training
knee fatigue and degeneration
repeated sprains or strains
recurring sports injuries that don’t fully resolve
Trying harder strengthens the compensation pattern, not the movement.
Why athletes get injured: Back pain, Hip problems, and overuse patterns
Most runners and athletes in squatting sports (fencing, weightlifting, CrossFit) struggle with back pain in running or back pain from squatting. Hence they are unable to recruit their hip joints for power.
Athletes often describe the sensation as:
“My back feels like a sheet of metal.”
This pattern of disproportionate use of the back and hips cannot be fixed with more strength training, more miles, or more stretching. You’re more likely to ‘practice’ and reinforce the patterns of straining yourself.
This can feel like a double whammy, you’re damned if you practice and you’re damned if you don’t.
A smarter, more effective approach to Sports Injury Recovery
There’s a way out of it that’s actually very simple and way more effective than all the hours of endurance training or foam rolling will get you.
I do this with my 1:1 clients and in my group programs. I guide athletes through somatic movement training and whole-body movement explorations that simulate the mechanics your sport truly requires. You get to experience these in different positions and aspects of your game. In a few weeks, you start to have such an expanded, 3D map of the movement that it starts to become spontaneous for you. You experience the movement required in your sport in multiple positions and variations.
Why Athletes progress faster with somatic training than strength training
The process is like running your own science experiment.
You learn to distinguish between:
strain, which is tension that gets in the way efficient engagement and makes body movement feel like molasses
power, which comes when your whole-body movement is organized for agility and propulsion
Over time, I have seen my athletic clients substantially supplement their endurance training with the sensory movement practice I teach them. They tell me that sensory movement sessions get them much further than any strength training ever did.
They stop operating from a “muscle mindset.”
They develop:
Whole-body movement awareness
Stronger proprioception
Faster adaptability to changing surfaces
More efficient recruitment of major joints
If you’d like to sustainably recover from your sports injury and want to get back to it with confidence, reach out to me via this contact form and we’ll chat to see if it’s a good fit for you.
