Top read of the month.
Planning to return to play after an anterior cruciate ligament injury (#korsbånd)? Always start with the End In Mind. How can we write a program without knowing the End Goal? How do you determine successful rehabilitation without having a plan for what to achieve? For an athlete, a successful ACL rehabilitation might mean participating in the shortest possible time (Goal Focus). From a coach’s perspective, a successful return to play might be measured by the athlete’s performance upon return (Performance Focus). From a physio’s perspective, it might be preventing any recurring (or new) injuries (Outcome Focus).
My top read of the month was “Vigh-Larsen JF, Junge N, Cialdella-Kam L, Tomás R, Young L, Krustrup P, Mohr M, Nybo L. Testing in Intermittent Sports: Importance for Training and Performance Optimization in Adult Athletes. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2024.” This article provided a review with 516 references on the importance of testing for training planning and performance optimization. It identified the capacities and physical demands for several intermittent sports such as soccer, rugby, handball, basketball, ice hockey, badminton, American football, Australian football, boxing, tennis, and volleyball (both team and beach).
According to the authors, these capacities and demands for each sport can be categorised into four themes:
Categories
- 1) format and exercise pattern.
- 2) physical demands such as cardiovascular, metabolic, and muscular.
- 3) capacity characteristics.
- 4) fatigue and recovery.
Understanding the specific physical capacities and demands of each sport is crucial for optimizing training and performance while minimizing injury risk. Every rehabilitation should start with a demand analysis. What are you returning to? What is required to return to performance? Do we have any pre-op data or normative data to benchmark our discharge criteria against? This article is a great tool to have the conversation about what you are returning to.
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