The No1 thing you should do to prevent injuries

Hey there, healthy listeners, thanks for joining us on this Body and Soul podcast. I hope you are staying healthy ish as the weather cools down. It's getting chill, isn't it. I am Felicity Harley. Joining us today is Aaron Scully. He's a strength and conditioning coach currently working with the Newcastle Night He is also founder of I Perform Lab and today we are discussing the most important thing you can do to prevent well injuries, not just now but

How are you a very good Thank you yourself?

Yeah, I'm good. Actually, I'm excited to talk to you. We haven't covered injuries for a very long time on the podcast, so took us through some common injuries that perhaps every I know you work with elite athletes to talk about. You know, the rest of us. The everyday athlete, what are some common ones you see out there?

Oh look, I mean you can't go past you know, the old calf strains and handscering strains, and you know just with your your runners, your runner's knee, and you know all sorts of little achilles, tendenoprathies and things like that, so that they're probably the most common things. And then as you get older, you're looking at things in and around your loll back and your heat.

So so it's funny how they're just the little calf strain. It sounds so little, and I know in elite athlete terms it is so little. Well actually, you know people can miss games for having strained calves, but it's amazing As an everyday athlete, it can just take over your your life and you're like, oh my gosh, I can't exercise for weeks.

Oh look.

It's especially you know for the weekend warrior that wants to sign up them you know, play another season of netball or oz tag or touch footy, and you know they're in their late thirties and whatnot, and they realize that, you know, you kind of need to train a little bit before you go out and do those things, so tends to be things like hampshets and cars that are the first things to go. That's why they call them a bit of a old man's or old ladies injury.

Hey, not old lady at thirty five, let's say late no, no.

No, no, no, no.

Do I actually really love that because that is what we all feel when we you know, I did actually play touch footy in summer and yeah, we're all over well many of us are over forty, and we're all like, oh my gosh, we are old ladies running around out there. Talk to us about determining someone's injury risk profile or how do you determine in the lab? And then how can the rest of us that can't get to your lab in Newcastle work out? What is our injury risk? What are they?

Yeah, well, I guess the way that I approach it, and I cannot, you know, not speak to everybody. There's a lot of different ways of're doing and injuries are multi factorial in that there's a lot of different things that contribute to them.

But one of the things that we know that.

Contributes to injuries is things like imbalances and weakness.

So we know.

That you know, if there's a over ten percent asymmetry between right and left and say your cars, your hamstrings, your groins, then there's an added increased risk to injury. But also if you're weak in those areas also you

If they're at an increased risk of injury.

Now we can't say that you're going to injure yourself, but we'll say, well, based on research, based on evidence, based off benchmarks that we have, you're at an increased risk of doing something such as your hams during broad on your calf, and without information, we can target an intervention to.

Mitigate that area of being injured. Strength train.

It's a really interesting approach, isn't it. What about if we can't you know, if we don't have access to all this tech. If we're at home, are there any things that we can check in with ourselves or do you know, I mean the balance is really interesting. For example, are there any things that we can do at home to check our injury risk or profile.

I'm going to be completely honest and as I'll be blunt here, get strong and if you're strong, get stronger because strength is a big key to longevity, being active. You know, we talk about balance stability falls in.

The aging population.

Everything comes down to muscle mass and getting stronger. You know, squat large, push, pull, rotate, all those fundamental movements.

And I'm not talking you.

Know things like you know, bodyweight squats for ten reps. I'm talking like load up and you don't need to be a power list, but you need to be doing something that's going to get your heart rate up and challenge you. That's the only way you're going to get stronger, and through there you nullify a lot of these risks. That's probably the main point in terms of how do you go.

About getting these getting these.

Information outside or you know, if you're not necessarily where I am, well, a lot of good phusiast will have some of this technology, and a lot of good gyms will have some of this technology. But it's one thing just to go and get a whole lot of testing dumb, But that's another thing to kind of get a really good target.

And intervention and stick to it. So insistencies also the key.

Yeah, great advice. What about overtraining? Do you see many people come in who have overtrained? And I mean, I feel like I'm seeing other end of the spectrum. There's a lot of people who are just well running half marathons and marathons, and there's just so much overtraining, and this we know can also lead to injury. Any warning signs here.

I reckon a lot of you.

I reckon overtraining would peak around January one when all the solutions start, and kind of fall off around February. But to answer your question, you know, there's probably two ways of looking at this, and this is probably more anecdotical than anything.

But if you haven't been doing much and.

Then you decide that you want to go to a marathon or whatever, be progressive with your training, be consistent with it, but don't try to do everything all at once, because that's when we're going to run in a little bit of trouble. One thing that we know about injuries and tendons in particular is they don't like holidays and they don't like prices.

So when you go from nothing to doing a lot, things start to flare up.

And when you go from doing a lot to nothing, then you're putting yourself at that riskl when you go and do something again. So instead of training for your mouth on five days a week, maybe start with two days a week and then the next week three and be progressive. Listen to your body because if you're feeling tired like you need to sleep, then it's probably a sleep related tiredness.

If you're feeling sore.

Af you unmotivated, then chances are that's mirroring the type of training that you're doing. So there's no really definitey answer there, but you've got to lay a little bit of intelligence to that as well, you know, understanding your body.

Yeah, no, trust me. That was an excellent answer, Aaron, Thank you for joining us on healthy.

Ish No, thanks for having me.

Well, there we go. Friends, Strength training, strength, feeling strong, being strong will help prevent injury. If you did enjoy this chat with Aaron, jump on rate and review it. Or, of course, you can subscribe to this podcast, share this set with a friend, Spread the healthy Ish, Love anything Else, head body and soul dot com dot you follow us on socials. Grab our print edition, which is out in your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow, stay healthy ish,