Is There a Tug of War Between Injury Risk and Performance?

The majority of the recent literature in load monitoring focuses on the association between training load measures and injury risk. However, injury risk is not the only outcome measure we are interested in… performance matters too! However, the understanding of the training-performance relationship in team sports is currently not as…

… But Does Injury Availability Affect your Team’s Physical Outputs?

Last month we explored the evidence base supporting the notion that athlete availability reduces your team’s chance of success. That post included a number of sources that demonstrated an association between injury rates and success. It may seem obvious but it is important to have the evidence to back up this…

Does Injury Availability Affect your Team’s Chance of Success?

The 2017/18 Premier League season has officially kicked off and so, therefore, have the injury statistic leagues.  It has long been suggested that injury rates and player availability affect a team’s chance of success.  This is not just the speculation of pundits or those down the pub; we have evidence…

Notes From: Football Medical Association (FMA) Conference 2017

Hard to Break: Building Resilience in Modern Day Athletes FMA Conference Programme in full here. Conference and awards pictures here.   Session 1 - Five steps to a winning mindset. Key Note Presentation: Damian Hughes @LiquidThinker   The brilliant Damian Hughes opened proceedings showcasing his five steps to a winning mindset….

The Debate on the Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio

I think it is an exciting time in training load research and applied practice. There is evidence-based analysis of training load taking place in the professional sporting environment as well as being published in the literature. In this post I will be focusing on the calculation of the acute:chronic workload…

Speed Development for Team Sports Masterclass Series: Jonas Dodoo

By West Bromwich Albion FC, in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University The second speaker of the evening was the internationally renowned sprint coach Jonas Dodoo (@EatSleepTrain_). Jonas is the Head Coach of Speed Works, a training programme run out of the Lee Valley Athletics Centre in London. He has…

Speed Development for Team Sports Masterclass Series: JB Morin

By West Bromwich Albion FC, in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University JB Morin presented alongside Jonas Dodoo at the first of a two-part masterclass series entitled Speed Development for Team Sports. The event was organised and hosted by West Bromwich Albion FC of the English Premier League, in collaboration…

Acute:Chronic Workloads and Rehabilitation: A Case Study

Last month I was invited to write a guest blog on Plinths and Platforms about load monitoring and rehabilitation.  It included an overview of Banister’s Fitness-Fatigue concept, the acute:chronic workload ratio and how it can be incorporated into the Return to Play (RTP) decision.  You can find that post HERE but…

Acute:Chronic Workloads and Rehabilitation

Recently I was asked by my colleague Sam Blanchard to write a guest post for his blog: Plinths and Platforms. Sam is also based in Western New York and is the Head of Rehabilitation for our affiliated American Hockey League (AHL) team, the Rochester Americans.   He had been reading some…

Is Return to Play from Hamstring Injuries in Applied Practice Evidence Based?

Whilst generally viewed as a somewhat avoidable soft tissue injury, hamstring strain injuries continue to plague the epidemiology in team sports.  There are an endless amount of statistics in the literature regarding their prevalence but perhaps most worryingly of all are the recent findings from Professor Jan Ekstrand’s European football…