Injuries and Athletic trainers

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psycho_dad

Well-known member
It has gotten to a point where our athletic trainer determines workouts more than I do as a coach. Our CC kids seem to be able to get through a season without constant visits to the trainer. However, our kids from other sports are constant fixtures in the trainers room. I can't do more to have more injury prevention or to make practices easier. It seems to get worse year after year. Does anyone else have this issue? I went to school with kids that constantly tried to get out of workouts and do as minimal work as possible, but now they have a built in excuse. Hurting and being injured are two different things. Am I just getting old? I can't remember missing a single interval. Kids can't get through the warm up. My football players are the worst offenders. It's like they are conditioned to seek treatment for something so they miss the first 30-45 min of practice. They mostly miss the warm up which makes no sense to me. You would think that would be a vital part of their day if they are hurting. What am I missing?

Don't get me started on missing meets for ACT and other things they would never miss a football or soccer game for.
 
 
There is so much to talk about here but I will keep it light. Track is the worst IMO because there appears to be quite a few participants that are not there for the right reason(s). Football players that are there because they are "encouraged" to and it is somewhat an extension of football. It is conditioning for football as opposed to the Track TEAM. They don't really want to be a part of the team and participate but feel pressure to from coaches, parents, etc.. Others are there to just be a part of something and are "in it for the track suit". Maybe we need to cut kids like in other sports as opposed to allowing everyone to "participate". Kids today (old man here) are just not as active as they used to be and therefor prone to injury, aches and pains due to there lack of conditioning and experience. Many don't yet understand the difference between soreness and injury. The huge increase in activity does cause stress types of issues and strains. Have you ever seen so many stress injuries? They are just not conditioned and when they start the season there is some expectation to be somewhat fit when they begin and they are not. Too much activity too quickly causes legit issues. First day of practice speed work is a recipe for injury. I suggest we have everyone build a base by running long slow distance for the first three weeks before they begin any speed work and that will help to eliminate some injuries as well as help to get rid of kids that don't want to run anything longer a quarter mile. Without the base to build off of we are asking for injuries.
 
When your track team depends on multisport athletes-definitely Coventry btw- you are gonna inevitably deal with plenty of people with whom track is not their primary sport. Because of that, they do not invest as much into it as they would into Football/Basketball/Soccer, and so these kinds of issues are prevalent. I have also noticed with regards to my comets, that yes in recent years, more and more kids have come out for the team. Our roster size has gone from 20 boys/20 girls to like 65boys/40 girls in 6 years. It seems that yes, we are benefitting from numbers, but it seems like the more kids come out for the team, the more we have those kinds of issues like you have described.
 
Let me say this...Kids are the same as the kids when I was young. Maybe have more demand on their time and parents that hover too much, but kids are kids. Have we not taught them the difference between sore and injured? Do we just know more now and it's really the right thing to hold them out of stuff? With much better shoes etc, I would think we would have less injuries and we seem to have many more. We had more multi sport athletes in my day not less. The percentage of injuries seems much too high. Have we chewed them up too much over the year before track season?
 
Over the years I've changed my warmup from an actual "warmup" to a lengthy prehab routine to address the many weaknesses these kids have (shins, hamstrings, hips, mobility). We do this lengthier prehab 3 days each week and, and we do the abbreviated warmup that still incorporates a lot of the prehab stuff on our heavier workout days or before the meets we have 2x/week.

I've told the trainer and the kids they are not permitted to go to the trainers until they do the warmup, as the PT they would do with the trainer is what we are all doing anyway. The trainer know this and is on board. There are only a few exceptions. If they are going to miss some practice, if they are really injured, it's probably the specific work they should miss anyway and not the warmup.

I haven't had a problem lately with football players or other athletes not buying into the program. I credit this to revamping my sprint training last year and my roster size increased a lot with that group.

With pain, I've had the attitude of, "oh, I didn't put you in x event because I saw you sit out of y or visit the trainer and I assumed you were hurt. So you're telling me you're OK?" and long-term that has maybe made a difference with kids being judicious about responding to their pain. On the other side of the coin, I tell them to tell me every ache and pain they get, and the other coaches and I talk them through modifications, PT, whatever. They're getting better at it.
 
I have modified the sprint work this season, so maybe I just have to be patient and let a year or two go by to see the real impact.
 
psycho_dad said:
Let me say this...Kids are the same as the kids when I was young. Maybe have more demand on their time and parents that hover too much, but kids are kids. Have we not taught them the difference between sore and injured? Do we just know more now and it's really the right thing to hold them out of stuff? With much better shoes etc, I would think we would have less injuries and we seem to have many more. We had more multi sport athletes in my day not less. The percentage of injuries seems much too high. Have we chewed them up too much over the year before track season?
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We can agree to disagree. They are not as active as they used to be. They learn the difference between sore and injured through experience. They have less experience due to being less active. Shoes are part of the problem. Shoe technology helps to create weakness and when you combine that with not being active enough (conditioned) then you have an increase in "injuries".
 
Just a reminder...

1) Thorough & varied dynamics warm-ups are best for athletes. 20-30 minutes at a minimum. Always keep an eye on proper technique when doing any drills. Once bad habits are developed, they are very difficult to unlearn. Better to go slow and do things properly than to rush through and develop bad habits.

2) Avoid ALL hard surfaces when doing any type of plyometric activity. As an engineer & someone with some post-grad biomechanics background (not too mention as a former athlete), plyometrics place significant g-loading on the body. Forces up to 10-20 times the body weight can be encountered in plyometrics, and hard surfaces create higher frequency shock loads in those tissues affected. These can and do cause shin splints in significant numbers of young legs, as well as creating other tissue damage (including fractures). I myself had shin splints for 6 years running due to a lack of understanding by both HS & collegiate coaches as to the dynamics of high frequency overloads on the body. This caused missed training. This was little understood back in the 70s-80s. I hope more understand it now. USE ONLY SOFT SURFACES when doing lower body plyometrics. It is better NOT to do plyometrics at all if you don't have soft surface availability.
 
One of the big changes in sprint training over the decades of my career is that speed need to be first and often. And this means central nervous system work right from the start. Full speed over short distances with full recovery. "Back in the day" we used to be told that kids had to get in shape before they could run fast. Now it is highly recommended that you start the short fast stuff whenever kids start training, because speed takes much longer to develop than conditioning.

Getting athletes (in particular our sprinters) to take warm-ups seriously is a constant problem. While many do them well, many do not. There is a lot of "I don't want to get tired before I run" going on. We tell them over and over that you should finish a warm up breathing hard and sweating. As other posters have pointed out, it needs to be varied and lengthy.

While it feels like we have so many more injured athletes now than we used to have, I have looked at old training logs from when I was coaching in the early 90s and the percentages are about the same. I am coaching much larger teams now (we have about 85 sprinters and about 180 total athletes) so it seems like more kids.

Most of the injuries are of two types: strong athletes overworking and kids who did very little or nothing to prepare for track season and are surprised that they are being asked to run every day and so are confusing sore and injured. It is hard parsing the two groups, because the wrong message will just give you a lot more kids in the first group. Our trainers have been working very closely with us to try to keep as many kids in the second group out of the training room as possible. We have already had several kids we talked to and suggested that track this year is not for them. We have invited all of those (and some have accepted) to do a modified workout routine (mostly away from the track, but checking in with me every day) to condition either for their next sport or to get stronger for next track season.
 
psycho_dad said:
Let me say this...Kids are the same as the kids when I was young. Maybe have more demand on their time and parents that hover too much, but kids are kids. Have we not taught them the difference between sore and injured? Do we just know more now and it's really the right thing to hold them out of stuff? With much better shoes etc, I would think we would have less injuries and we seem to have many more. We had more multi sport athletes in my day not less. The percentage of injuries seems much too high. Have we chewed them up too much over the year before track season?
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Stressing the difference between soreness and injury kept my son from being diagnosed with a congenital issue with his kneecap that cost him his senior year of track after being a state qualifier as a junior. His school trainer kept trying to relieve the "soreness" and never suggested he seek a doctor's help. He never told me how bad the pain was because he felt pressured to deal with a little soreness.
 
mathking said:
One of the big changes in sprint training over the decades of my career is that speed need to be first and often. And this means central nervous system work right from the start. Full speed over short distances with full recovery. "Back in the day" we used to be told that kids had to get in shape before they could run fast. Now it is highly recommended that you start the short fast stuff whenever kids start training, because speed takes much longer to develop than conditioning.

Getting athletes (in particular our sprinters) to take warm-ups seriously is a constant problem. While many do them well, many do not. There is a lot of "I don't want to get tired before I run" going on. We tell them over and over that you should finish a warm up breathing hard and sweating. As other posters have pointed out, it needs to be varied and lengthy.

While it feels like we have so many more injured athletes now than we used to have, I have looked at old training logs from when I was coaching in the early 90s and the percentages are about the same. I am coaching much larger teams now (we have about 85 sprinters and about 180 total athletes) so it seems like more kids.

Most of the injuries are of two types: strong athletes overworking and kids who did very little or nothing to prepare for track season and are surprised that they are being asked to run every day and so are confusing sore and injured. It is hard parsing the two groups, because the wrong message will just give you a lot more kids in the first group. Our trainers have been working very closely with us to try to keep as many kids in the second group out of the training room as possible. We have already had several kids we talked to and suggested that track this year is not for them. We have invited all of those (and some have accepted) to do a modified workout routine (mostly away from the track, but checking in with me every day) to condition either for their next sport or to get stronger for next track season.
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You have learned well, Pilgrim.

I don't know whether you've read the book written by Ben Johnson's late coach, Charlie Francis, but he talks about some of his early learning first as an athlete, then particularly as a coach that the speed component is the most often and earliest trained part of a 100m/200m/hurdlers' regimen. Francis talks about the problems he faced vis-a-vis the popular mode of Canadian sprint training in the 70s-80s. Their methodology was the old "build a base" system, running slow intervals & distance in the fall, and progressively moving towards sprinting in the spring. From a physiology standpoint in developing fast twitch muscle fibers, it makes no sense at all. Fortunately, top level coaching has advanced beyond those days.

For all those training short distance sprinters (and having carry-over value to other events), speed work needs to be done from within the first month of training (looking at a yearly cycle). I would URGE ALL to read "SPEED TRAP" if you really want to understand top level coaching. The late Mr. Francis goes into depth about how he learned from the GDR coaches and their approach (everyone knows about PEDS...that's not the issue here) to training their sprinters, particularly the female sprinters that ran for Motor City Jena, the then top sprint program in the world. When I first read it in 1991, it opened my eyes and I have consulted the book MANY TIMES over the years. Nuggets of gold.
 
Psycho.....there seems to be a few different angles on this:

1. THe kid that goes to the trainer and knows they will shut them down.
2. THe kid that goes to the trainer because they are sore or not doing what they need to do like hydrate...trainer tries to tell the coach how to train a kid.
3. The kid that is actually injured----rare.

In regards to trainers that seem to over step their job title..yes I have seen this.
 
The training room can also be quite the social scene. Both genders like to go there for attention from each other and the training staff without the risk of being told to go work out. The school I coached at had a team rule that no one was allowed to go to the trainer without permission from a coach. The coach made a judgement of whether it was soreness or an injury and the trainer took control if the coach felt that was best. The next day the procedure was repeated, see coach then trainer if permission granted. This seemed to help the situation over going directly to the training room daily.
 
A few other things to throw out there. Our kids that wear Nike have a much higher rate of injuries.

I had a kid come up to me today and said his mom wanted him to miss our meet tomorrow so he could spend his birthday with the family. Mom asked if I could skip the meet because it's my birthday. I laughed cuz I thought he was kidding me. That happens in Football too right? So, parents are an issue.
 
psycho_dad said:
A few other things to throw out there. Our kids that wear Nike have a much higher rate of injuries.

I had a kid come up to me today and said his mom wanted him to miss our meet tomorrow so he could spend his birthday with the family. Mom asked if I could skip the meet because it's my birthday. I laughed cuz I thought he was kidding me. That happens in Football too right? So, parents are an issue.
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The parents, kids, trainer and everyone else involved with track are practically bystanders. Most people have no clue.

As for the original topic, trainers seem to be versed in acute injuries that other sports have, not so much with the overuse injury or the typical injury in track and field. Their knee jerk reaction is to shut down a kid or question what the coach is doing to injure kids
 
I had a vaulter in 2010...chronic shin problems that had developed long before she took up pole vaulting. She was a senior trying to make her 1st state meet after vaulting 9' 6" as a junior. I only got to work with her when she was a senior. She was only able to do two running workouts a week...and that included the sprinting down runways while vaulting in meets. While it limited how much I could do with her training, she nevertheless vaulted 10' 10" that year in May, 10' 9" at Regional, and vaulted in the state meet. And she managed that state meet after having vaulted 11' 4" in practice 3 days before the state meet...then dropped in the box on her rear after trying to move up on pole size. That one was my mistake. However, a quick 48 hours of therapy got her in shape for Saturday's state meet, and she acquitted herself well.

Injury, whether chronic or temporary, is always something that needs to be kept under close supervision of the coach. Trainers should be there to HELP both athlete & coach, not to hinder.
 
JAVMAN83 said:
You have learned well, Pilgrim.

I don't know whether you've read the book written by Ben Johnson's late coach, Charlie Francis, but he talks about some of his early learning first as an athlete, then particularly as a coach that the speed component is the most often and earliest trained part of a 100m/200m/hurdlers' regimen. Francis talks about the problems he faced vis-a-vis the popular mode of Canadian sprint training in the 70s-80s. Their methodology was the old "build a base" system, running slow intervals & distance in the fall, and progressively moving towards sprinting in the spring. From a physiology standpoint in developing fast twitch muscle fibers, it makes no sense at all. Fortunately, top level coaching has advanced beyond those days.

For all those training short distance sprinters (and having carry-over value to other events), speed work needs to be done from within the first month of training (looking at a yearly cycle). I would URGE ALL to read "SPEED TRAP" if you really want to understand top level coaching. The late Mr. Francis goes into depth about how he learned from the GDR coaches and their approach (everyone knows about PEDS...that's not the issue here) to training their sprinters, particularly the female sprinters that ran for Motor City Jena, the then top sprint program in the world. When I first read it in 1991, it opened my eyes and I have consulted the book MANY TIMES over the years. Nuggets of gold.
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Charlie Francis' book is good. It and some classes from Boo Schexnayder, and seeing the results of our sprint coaches putting those ideas into practice, put me on the path we are on today as a team.
 
mathking said:
Charlie Francis' book is good. It and some classes from Boo Schexnayder, and seeing the results of our sprint coaches putting those ideas into practice, put me on the path we are on today as a team.
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Very cool. Clyde Hart's school of 400m training is a great one as well!
 
Mathking and Javman883, have you seen a decrease in injuries as well as success in performances? Do I just need to be patient? Is there a difference for kids that play other sports vs track/CC specific kids? We seemed to be doing much better with injuries vs past few seasons, but lately, we have gone backwards. Kids needing treatment before practice and being limited in practice. The cream seems to be rising, but it almost seems like a football culture where significant time is taken away from track practice because every little ache needs treatment. "I have a spot here on my neck that hurts, I need treatment!" More of those vs "Do your shins feel any better? yes, I stretch when I get home and ice too. As long as I do that, I can keep practicing."

I have a distance runners mentality. I can't ever remember doing any sport where I wasn't hurting in some way. I think I know when a kid needs a day weekend off, but I have too many kids too often needing to shut it down. I hope I just need to stick to the plan or alter it a bit.

What should my dynamic warm up be for sprinters? Can I possibly be doing too much?
 
psycho_dad said:
Mathking and Javman883, have you seen a decrease in injuries as well as success in performances? Do I just need to be patient? Is there a difference for kids that play other sports vs track/CC specific kids? We seemed to be doing much better with injuries vs past few seasons, but lately, we have gone backwards. Kids needing treatment before practice and being limited in practice. The cream seems to be rising, but it almost seems like a football culture where significant time is taken away from track practice because every little ache needs treatment. "I have a spot here on my neck that hurts, I need treatment!" More of those vs "Do your shins feel any better? yes, I stretch when I get home and ice too. As long as I do that, I can keep practicing."

I have a distance runners mentality. I can't ever remember doing any sport where I wasn't hurting in some way. I think I know when a kid needs a day weekend off, but I have too many kids too often needing to shut it down. I hope I just need to stick to the plan or alter it a bit.

What should my dynamic warm up be for sprinters? Can I possibly be doing too much?
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I would give it some more time. We saw what seemed like more kids getting hurt when we started doing this about 10 years back. But it worked itself out. A lot of it was because they needed to really understand that it was just as important to run the slower paced workouts at the slower paces (not too fast) as it was to run the faster stuff at the faster paces. It took about a year for us to really see a difference, but we definitely see more improvement in sprinters from freshman year to senior year than we had previously. For boys about an extra 0.20 seconds of improvement over three years compared to previously. For the girls an additional +0.32. This improvement really brought home to me how much good training matters. Even our very best freshman performers have improved significantly if they stayed with track. (Abby Steiner for instance, improved half a second in the 100 and 1.2 in the 200 from state meet freshman year to state meet senior year.)

We also saw a reduction in injuries, though this is harder to quantify. The best measure we have is the number of meets lost to injury, which has dropped noticeably. Maybe by 1/3 or so.

I think that XC kids, swimmers and soccer players in general have been better than some of the others. But I don't know that it is mentality as much as being fit to run. (Caveat: The soccer players who are also doing club tend to get hurt more because of overuse. So we pay close attention to them.)

Our "it hurts I must go to the trainer" group is now mostly kids who did no training over the winter and try to jump in right where they were at the end of the year before. So they run their 70% intervals at 80%, their 80% at 90%, etc. The change is also is likely because we had cuts for sprinters and throwers this year. (We cut from about 110 to about 75 sprinters and 65 to 40 throwers.) Part of the cutting was us watching how kids did in workouts the first week of practice. So there are fewer (though still too many in my view) kids who are constantly in with the trainers without any specific injury.

Our warmup has gotten a little longer over the past half a decade or so as well. Everything I have read is that any sensible dynamic warm up routine will work if the athletes do it correctly. And don't rush through it. We start with a lap jog. It includes some slow drills for shins and feet, hurdle mobility drills, some drills that are a little faster and more dynamic and it ends with some running (about 30-40 meters) at increasing intensity. One thing that has helped is doing the same warm up for practice and meets. It gets kids into the habit of properly warming up, particularly when it is not cold but not really warm. Another thing we stress is adequate clothing. For the sprinters we tell them when it is cooler than 70 they should have something on their legs for warm up. That is alien to me as a cold weather loving distance person, but it is important. It is a LOT easier for sprinters to develop small injuries when they are not warm enough and trying to run fast.
 
Thank you. Good Stuff. Seems I have to just relax and let things work themselves out.

I like the "Abby Steiner for instance" There are about none of us that can relate to that.

Woodridge to Minster, "what is more satisfying, the first 4 championships or the second 4? We can't decide." Minster reply. "It might be the third 4!"
 
Very good advice, Mathking. I hadn't put 2 and 2 together & missed that you were with Dublin Coffman. Hope you all have continued successes.

While I haven't coached any sprinters in a long while, as a field event athlete myself, I've observed that distance runners equate miles with effort, which make sense when the most necessary component of distance running (of which I don't count the mile) is VO2 max. You can't get there any other way than by continuous stressing the cardiovascular system, and that usually comes through LSD (the good kind, long slow distance). Short sprinters, on the other hand, their needs are served in the development of ATP reserves and conditioning of neuromotor system. Sprinters experience intense taxing of the their neuromotor systems when going 90-100% of max effort. It is incredibly fatiguing, and it requires far much more recuperative time between efforts. For distance coaches that have never trained or competed in the sprinting events, it is a difficult concept to grasp as it is not a familiar experience to them. Distance runners frequently don't understand just how taxing sprinting is. Coaches not familiar with the different needs frequently overtax sprinters' systems through too many high repetitions. While the muscular system can recover within a 24 hour period, it takes the neurological system upwards of 48 hours to recover from repeated high-stress training/competition. While dynamic warm-ups can start out together as a group, the drills should progressively grow apart as each training group nears their respective training regimens for the day. A common warm-up of 10-20 minutes can help build team bonding, then each training group moves to its more respective, task-specific dynamic warm-up.

Hope this helps with some understanding.
 
JAVMAN83 said:
Very good advice, Mathking. I hadn't put 2 and 2 together & missed that you were with Dublin Coffman. Hope you all have continued successes.

While I haven't coached any sprinters in a long while, as a field event athlete myself, I've observed that distance runners equate miles with effort, which make sense when the most necessary component of distance running (of which I don't count the mile) is VO2 max. You can't get there any other way than by continuous stressing the cardiovascular system, and that usually comes through LSD (the good kind, long slow distance). Short sprinters, on the other hand, their needs are served in the development of ATP reserves and conditioning of neuromotor system. Sprinters experience intense taxing of the their neuromotor systems when going 90-100% of max effort. It is incredibly fatiguing, and it requires far much more recuperative time between efforts. For distance coaches that have never trained or competed in the sprinting events, it is a difficult concept to grasp as it is not a familiar experience to them. Distance runners frequently don't understand just how taxing sprinting is. Coaches not familiar with the different needs frequently overtax sprinters' systems through too many high repetitions. While the muscular system can recover within a 24 hour period, it takes the neurological system upwards of 48 hours to recover from repeated high-stress training/competition. While dynamic warm-ups can start out together as a group, the drills should progressively grow apart as each training group nears their respective training regimens for the day. A common warm-up of 10-20 minutes can help build team bonding, then each training group moves to its more respective, task-specific dynamic warm-up.

Hope this helps with some understanding.
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Thanks Javman. You are right on target. Our distance kids do a very different warm up than our sprinters (the one I described). Most of the field kids start with the sprinters, but then the throwers move off into their own group as well. We start everyone together in one place, which helps with the tram building.

In college I was a steeplechaser who sometimes ran hurdles. That really brought home for me the idea that different kinds of workouts were taxing in different ways. The thing that made me realization the need for different warm up routines was throwing the javelin. One time we got a meet late and I only spent 15 minutes warming up for the javelin. I was sore for a week. In a distance race I would have done the 15 minutes, started conservatively and been fine.
 
mathking said:
Thanks Javman. You are right on target. Our distance kids do a very different warm up than our sprinters (the one I described). Most of the field kids start with the sprinters, but then the throwers move off into their own group as well. We start everyone together in one place, which helps with the tram building.

In college I was a steeplechaser who sometimes ran hurdles. That really brought home for me the idea that different kinds of workouts were taxing in different ways. The thing that made me realization the need for different warm up routines was throwing the javelin. One time we got a meet late and I only spent 15 minutes warming up for the javelin. I was sore for a week. In a distance race I would have done the 15 minutes, started conservatively and been fine.
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Being a "javman" myself, pun intended, I can understand your soreness. My eventual warm-up routine once I became a jav man ran 40-45 minutes. At meets, I'd usually start about an hour before I was scheduled to throw in order to allow for miscellaneous hindrances that normally come up when warming-up with other throwers. That allowed for doing what was necessary without feeling rushed. Same applies for other events. Add extra time at meets, when possible, in order to not feel rushed and forget key warm-up routines.

Good luck to you guys this season.
 
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