Every quality sports medicine based program begins with the right evaluation. In addition to assessing your athletes for performance, every athlete must be screened for the likelihood of injury.
Assessing athletic performance is well documented. Measuring speed, agility, endurance, power, and strength are performed daily by coaches, trainers, and performance enhancement specialists.
Unfortunately, the sports medicine community is only beginning to understand screening to prevent injury.
“An All Inclusive Process”
Maximum Training Solutions, LLC has developed an all inclusive injury screening process as the foundation of the PROvention™ system. The process takes into account biomechanics, mobility, core stability, proprioception, power, and deceleration. There are 4 basic components to the screening process:
1. Foot Biomechanical Analysis
- Athletes with poor foot mechanics will likely sustain lower extremity injuries.
- The major components of the foot analysis are forefoot mobility, foot pronation, and internal rotation of the lower leg during gait.
- Athletes with a rigid forefoot will likely have difficulty absorbing shock and decelerating quickly.
- Midfoot over pronation can easily lead to chronic overuse injuries (i.e. posterior tibialis tendinitis, peroneal tendinitis, plantar fascitis, etc.), as well as making the athlete likely to enter a position of internal rotation and knee valgus. This position is known to lead to anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears.
- Internal rotation either with or without foot pronation is likely to lead to knee pain of various sources, including the dreaded ACL tear.
2. Lumbopelvic Biomechanical Analysis
- Athletes with Lumbopelvic dysfunction are predisposed to anything from low back pain, to hamstring strains, to knee injuries, to chronic pain in the foot and everywhere in between.
- Anywhere from 60-90% of athletes will present with lumbopelvic dysfunction, depending upon the demands of the sport and maturity of the athletes.
- Most athletes with lumbopelvic dysfunction will present with either a functional or anatomical leg length discrepency.
- Leg length discrepencies will cause an athlete to strike much differently on one limb than the other. This asymmetry is a major cause of lower extremity injury.
3. Functional Movement Screen
- The FMS has been well documented by Gray Cook, PT, CSCS, and Lee Burton, PT, ATC, CSCS as a key component to injury predisposition.
- The FMS is a systematic approach to looking at how the body moves through the basic fundamental movements of all sports.
- For more information visit www.functionalmovement.com
4. Hop, Stop, & Leap
- Athletes must be able to create enough power to control their body during quick and explosive movement, while also possessing the ability quickly and efficiently absorb shock and decelerate under control.
- The hop portion of the test looks at the athlete’s ability to perform a single leg broad jump to demonstrate power.
- The leap evaluation asks the athlete to show their body control by performing a broad jump while landing on the opposite foot and coming to a complete stop within one second of landing.
- For more information visit www.athletebydesign.com
The total evaluation process is streamlined to be performed in approximately 20 minutes per athlete. Obviously, it is thorough and involved, but so are today’s athletics.
MTS can either screen your athletic teams for injury risk, or educate your staff on the details of injury screening.
Once athletes are screened and injury risk factors are identified, the real work begins. The job then becomes performing corrective exercises to prevent your teams injuries.
Contact MTS to learn how to better approach your strength and conditioning programs to better shield your athletes from injury.
There are several key components that make the PROvention™ system extremely effective. Click on each component to learn more:
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