How come so many approaches to injury prevention fail? After all, in elite sports, we all recognize the resources that have been put into an athlete. Salary, support staffs, potentially years of development are all part of the investment by an organization.
We’ve seen the graphs and visuals of how much money a team loses when a player gets hurt, and it can be staggering. It also obviously impacts performance.
This chart from OverTheCap.com helps make it visual. Too many injuries to key players hurts your chances of winning.
A common glaring issue in elite sports is the endless cycle of “silver bullet” solutions to injury. It’s the thinking that one test is the key to reduce the incidence or predicting it. Or thinking this is the one exercise that will prevent it.
These approaches tend to come and go with questionable impact. Sure, some seem to work, but then a slew of other studies and real-world examples says they don’t.
Hamstring injuries in pro sports seem to fall into this category. We know they happen a lot, and we spend a lot of time, effort, and money trying to eliminate them. Yet, they are still happening at high rates.
Why Can’t We Solve More Injury Problems?
With all the people looking at this and the desire to solve it, why can’t we do better?
Some will argue we are. I’d say there is progress, but as much failure as success.
Others will argue that the interventions and resources are minuscule and unimportant in the face of more substantial coaching, performance, and financial decisions. I’d say there is often truth to that.
But let’s assume some smart people really want this to be solved and that there are organizations that can get on board.
What stands in the way?
I think in a lot of cases the problem is thinking.
Or, more specifically, a way of thinking.
Whether it’s human nature, laziness, or the failures of our education systems, most people want to apply very linear thinking and mechanistic views of sports performance.
LINEAR THINKING
We’ve all done it. The analogy of the athlete as a car, with parts that can be broken down, analyzed and changed. Learning about the body as parts and individual systems.
Linear thinking is, well…. very linear. It’s this or that. Cause, effect. Beginning, end. If, then.
And this is an effective way of thinking in traditional mechanical systems. Break it down to it’s parts. Which makes sense since so much of our education has been built on premises of the industrial revolution.
Breaking the athlete down into essential functions and parts such as muscles, strength, energy systems, mindset, nutrition, etc.… is the norm. These are systems and functions looked at in near isolation.
It’s definitely understandable why it’s taught this way. Way easier to introduce and organize.
It’s also how most high-performance teams are organized; defined roles and silos. That’s because people are educated in the professional domain that way as well.
It’s tough to breakdown and analyze everything about an athlete and performance. As I’ve argued before, sports performance is a VUCA environment.
However, this approach misses the most fundamental level of analysis; the athlete as a whole.
SYSTEMS THINKING
Systems thinking moves us from conceiving in linear patterns and observing isolated data, identifying interacted patterns of behavior and outcomes over time, and discovering the underlying structures that drive those patterns and outcomes.
“…dividing the cow in half does not give you two smaller cows. You may end up with a lot of hamburger, but the essential nature of “cow” — a living system capable, among other things, of turning grass into milk — then would be lost. This is what we mean when we say a system functions as a “whole.” Its behavior depends on its entire structure and not just on adding up the behavior of its different pieces.” — Kauffman, 1980, p2
While there are different definitions of systems thinking, it generally requires curiosity and a willingness to see a situation more fully, from an interconnected point of view, and acknowledge that there are often multiple interventions to a problem. It also drives us to understand that the intervention can alter the system’s patterns and outcomes in other ways.
This great graphic from Disrupt Design on Medium helps illustrate some of the differences from traditional linear thinking. Dr. Leyla Acaroglu has a great series on design thinking you can check out.
Levels of Systems
An athlete is a system unto themselves with all the interconnected complexity that comes with that. And don’t overlook that they operate with-in other systems.
Systems thinking requires you to shift your mindset, away from linear to circular. A fundamental principle of this shift is that everything is interconnected.
On a basic level, the systems for an athlete are inter-connected.
Your energy systems are interconnected with your nutrition, as well as your motor control and movement efficiency. Your motor control is interconnected with your cognitive focus, muscular strength qualities, the surface you are in contact with, and the changing situations in the game.
On a higher level, the athlete’s stamina in an event may be interconnected with their macro and micro nutrition status, which is connected to the team’s meal plans. Which are connected to the budget, as well as the outlook of the nutritionist and performance director. In turn, those are influenced by the personal preferences of players and coaches, etc.…
You can also look at a higher level of interconnection when a team plays a complex, dynamic game against another complex system…the opposition.
This is why sports performance is complex; lots of levels of systems with high degrees of interconnectedness.
Complexity
With these multiple levels of systems interacting, is it really surprising that a single test or an intervention fails to prevent injury?
Not to me.
So, then the question becomes; how do we attack it?
I’ll share more on some of the strategies to use in systems thinking and problem-solving in a VUCA environment down the line.
But for now, understand that if you are part of a team, your way of thinking is actually part of the system.
Recognizing where you use a mechanistic, linear thought process, and then considering a systems thinking process might be an excellent first step.
