How to Predict Injuries Before They Happen

If you’ve ever suffered from an injury, you know how disruptive it can be. Maybe it’s something traumatic, like a torn meniscus, torn ACL, torn rotator cuff, or maybe it’s something more long term and nagging, like tendonitis. In either case, your life has been disrupted.

• You may have to attend rehab a couple times per week, plus do your own additional exercises at home
• You might need surgery
• You can’t do certain activities that you enjoy doing, like tennis, golf, hiking, gardening, etc.

But wouldn’t it be great to be able to figure out what injury (or injuries) you are at risk for, so that you could prevent it from ever happening? Wouldn’t it be great to predict injuries before they happen?

Fortunately, to some extent, you can.

I’m always looking for ways to offer a better and better service to our clients, so remember the researcher that I hired to research how to exercise for osteoarthritis? Well, after our arthritis research was complete, I had him turn to the topic of how to predict injuries before they happen.

The rules were the same: he was only allowed to look at scientific/medical research. No reading mainstream books, no reading magazines, no watching videos on Youtube. Just the highest quality of evidence.

That’s what we’ll talk about in this article:

• Factors that predispose a person to different injuries
• Predictive assessments to figure out the likelihood of an injury
• What can be done about them
• What we still don’t know

While all in all, we came up with 22 pages of research, I’m only going to give you the highlights here, so as not to bore you with technical details.

If you want to assess your own injury risk, just email me with the subject line “Injury Risk Assessment.”

FACTORS THAT PREDISPOSE YOU TO INJURY

FACTOR 1: LACK OF STRENGTH

It’s no surprise that lack of strength can predispose us to injury, but “lack of strength” is relative not just between people, but also between muscle groups, and…