Softball Injuries - Dynamic Warm-Ups Prevent Long-Term Overuse Injuries

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One of the things I am doing with my new 16U team this fall is put all of my athletes through a functional assessment. I hear you: "What the heck is a functional assessment?" Let me give you an analogy. When you intend to buy a used car, before you pay for it, you take it to an independent expert mechanic for a full inspection to make sure everything is alright. A full inspection also helps identify what will need to be replaced or fixed in the near future to keep the car in good condition and running well. A functional assessment is like a full car inspection but for the body. The aim of a functional assessment is to identify what needs "fixing" in the body in order to prevent injuries and optimize performance. It could be muscular imbalances, faulty muscular recruitment patterns, and tightness in certain areas, bad posture, or bad alignment.

All these things can eventually lead to injuries and also hurt your performance because the body is not as efficient as it could be. I am taking them to see a team of expert trainers who are going to perform individual functional assessment on each of them. They will probably diagnosed a lot of different things that will need work such as strengthening certain stabilizers muscles, increase flexibility of others,  fixing poor posture or alignment, etc. From there, I will design an individualized corrective exercise program for each one of my athletes. Athletes are like race cars. You need to fine tune them to get the most out of them.

Did you know that many of the exercises that are prescribed to athletes for correcting these various problems are found in my Dynamic Warm-up for Softball System? We use dynamic warm-ups not only to prevent injuries for the upcoming game, practice or workout but also to train the body to be more athletic and prevent long-term overuse injuries through carefully selected exercises that do fix some of these common problems. My team goes through the routine that is found in my system and after only 3 weeks since I started working with them, I am already seeing a big improvement! They are more stable.  They are more solid.  They look more like athletes when they move.  This is pure pleasure to my eyes. That means that my athletes will sustain a lot less injuries and will perform a lot better. Imagine after 6 months of doing this… in addition to the individualization of their corrective exercise programs, I will have nicely fine-tuned race cars! Just like big storms like Katrina, Injuries do happen. It's not a matter of if but when. Make sure you are preparing for it and you might not get hit too hard. Make sure you take preventive action. Train hard. Play hard.