Aside from a more focused and active warm up routine, other prehab techniques included strengthening the muscles that surround a joint. Knees, shoulders, ankles, and hips are the joints that most often become injured in sports. Ligaments and tendons are the parts of the body that connect our bones to each other, and our muscles to our bones. These structures themselves cannot be strengthened, so we are responsible for protecting those structures that are placed under a lot of wear and tear, by building strong muscles that surround them.

Knees, for example, twist and bend and straighten with high torque and force. To protect the ligaments in the knee (especially the ALC and MCL), athletes need to have strong quadriceps and hamstrings. Exercises that can help are lunges, squats, step ups, dead lifts, knee drives, etc. Another important aspect to consider is the form in which you bend your knees. The knee should never bend forward over the toes, and should never collapse inward toward your other leg (into a valgus position). When performing lunges and squats, pay attention to and correct any form issues you may have so that you are training those muscles to keep the joint aligned while performing in your sport.

Shoulders are prone to dislocation and separation, especially for throwing athletes. The shoulder cuff is made up of four muscles that keep the shoulder in its socket. The muscles are very small, so training and strengthening them should not use much weight. A good way to do this is to focus on external rotation exercises using small dumbbells or resistance bands. These can be done overhead or out to the side. Another beneficial movement is scapular retraction which is done with exercises like rows along with the stretching of the chest by placing hands on the outside of a doorframe and stepping through the doorway.

To prevent broken or sprained ankles, the three tiny ligaments on the outsides of the ankles must be protected. The muscles to strengthen are the muscles of the calf and foot. These are easily strengthened using a four way resistance band, or heel- toe walking. Although simple, these muscles are important to strengthen.

The hips are prone to tightness and straining. To prevent this from happening, the athlete must have a strong core. Core exercises are extremely important to every sport because they provide the base of balance and support for the rest of the body. The core can be strengthened in many ways. It is important, however, to realize that the core includes not only abdominals, but the back as well. Good back exercises include supermans, roman chair, and exercises on a swiss ball, alternating leg and arm extensions.

So to keep yourself safe, out of the training room, and on the field, it is important to concentrate and put forth a real effort to protecting the body that performs all the intense movements that make you a good candidate for collegiate athletics. If your body is injured, it can’t perform, so make sure to take pride in exercising properly by warming up well with a focused dynamic stretch routine, and good form in a lifting routine to strengthen the muscles that will protect your joints from injury.

You’re at the top of your game, running faster and jumping higher than ever before. You’ve been training hard and have been talking to prospective college coaches. You are ready to take your dream of being a collegiate athlete to the next and final phase. All those workouts, all those aches and pains will add up to this. There are only five minutes left in your last season’s game, and as you finish up your high school career with your dreams in plain sight, you watch your team from inside the training room, with your leg elevated, and the chill of the realization that you’re done with sports for the next few weeks, or months, or even more? Or is that just the chill of the ice surrounding your stiff joint?

Injury is an unpleasant and unfortunately common occurrence in athletics no matter what in the sport. The high demands of sprinting, jumping, kicking, throwing and more take a toll on muscles and joints. The twisting of a joint or the overstretching or tearing a muscle or ligament is extremely painful, can require surgery (which takes time for healing—time that the athlete is not working out and getting stronger), but can be prevented. Most athletes are aware of the fact that warming up and stretching properly are beneficial to injury prevention and the effectiveness of the athletes’ performance, but what they may not realize is that there are programs that can be incorporated into a normal workout that can actually strengthen and protect athletes as well. This blog is meant to give insight to a proper, focused warm up, and some key “prehab” techniques that can and will help athletes if they take the time to do them.

Warming up before working out is usually the time athletes take to go through the motions and appease their coaches and catch up with their teammates before getting into the workout. It usually consists of jogging a lap slowly and standing with their legs spread wider than shoulder length while the kids laugh and sway and catch up on last night’s tv shows or sport center highlights. I know, because as a dual collegiate athlete myself, that’s what I did. Whenever the coach glanced toward us, I’d bend down a little to appear to be “preparing” for our session.

After numerous injuries and taking classes like anatomy and physiology and kinesiology, I learned the importance of a good warm up in preventing those injuries I faced. Warming up is important because it raises the temperature of the body by pumping blood. Therefore, an athlete should break a sweat in their warm up. Once the body temperature is up, the muscles have enough blood flowing in them to loosen up to optimal performance lengths. To further optimize that, and slowly prepare muscles for activity, dynamic stretching should be used.

Static stretching is standing around in a circle holding a stretch for a count of 10, and is pretty ineffective, especially since the athletes probably aren’t even really paying attention to the stretches. Dynamic stretching is much better for pre-activity because it involves some focus; keeps the body moving, blood pumping, and temperature raised; it lengthens muscles that are sport specific by maximizing the range of motion; and studies show that it prepares your neuromuscular system as well, which means that your muscles will be able to contract harder, making you stronger. Examples of good dynamic stretches can be leg swings, hopping, skipping for height, arm swings, high knees, walking quad stretches—and anything else that involves movement and stretches the muscles.

Look for part two for more active ways to prevent injury.