DYNAMIC WARM UP FOR OVERHEAD ATHLETES TO REDUCE INJURY

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This is a guest post from www.weckmethod.com.  Written by Dr. John Rusin

INTRODUCTION

It’s a new day and age in the world of high-level athletic performance and development. Over the last decade, athletes in nearly every sport have become exponentially bigger, faster, and more explosive.Through early sport specializations, enhanced functional training methodologies and advanced sport specific coaching, the athlete of the 21^st century is now more physically impressive than ever before.

The strength and conditioning community should be reveling in their abilities as an industry to raise the physical bar of athletes far and wide, but this is far from the case.This insanely high level of current day athletic performance is instead quickly dismissed due to an equally high and increasing rate of widespread injuries. Has the requisite need to stay healthy and functioning during athletic participation been blurred by our society’s unwavering goal of producing the ultimate athletic performance at all costs?

THE OVERHEAD ATHLETE EPIDEMIC

There may not be a more injury susceptible sporting demographic than overhead athletes. It has been a rising topic of heated debate throughout youth baseball, and is now making it into the likes of women’s volleyballand tennis; how do we keep our youth athletes from being put under the knife before they hit high school?

In a society poisoned with delusional thoughts of making every elite 12-year-old baseball star playing in the Little League World Series out to be the next Mike Trout, children are becoming overworked, over-trained and put behind the 8-ball of orthopedic dysfunction at younger and younger ages.

Due to the nature of overhead throwing biomechanics, the passive tissues consisting of ligaments, fascia and tendon-bone insertion points of overworked musculature are placed in a precarious position for injury, especially as frequencies and training loads are increased. This, in combination with year round specialty sport training, causes a cascade of hazardous chronic inflammation and mechanical breakdown of tissues, especially those still developing in younger athletes.

Over training isn’t something surgery can fix. It is something that needs to be monitored and nipped in the bud before it ever puts athletes at increased risk under the watch of coaches, trainers or therapists.

THE PROBLEM WITH TRADITIONAL SHOULDER WARM-UPS

The shoulder girdle is one of the most anatomically complex and biomechanically advanced regions of the human body. The synergistic movement, rhythm and stabilization of multiple joints in unison are needed to maintain a high level of performance while also decreasing unwanted stress when it comes to throwing and hitting from an arm overhead position.

Find the rest of the article at https://www.weckmethod.com/articles/dynamic-warm-up-for-overhead-athletes-to-reduce-injury