The Easy Way to Reduce Risk of Sports Injury… in Just 5 Minutes

If you’re a sports or fitness coach who wants to reduce the risk of sports injury quickly, and help injuries become a thing of the past for everybody you coach without having to learn complicated anatomy, then keep reading — this is powerful stuff!

There’s an easy way for you to help reduce the risk of injury really fast and it’s using the injury hack of adding fun.

Adding fun to your sessions is a powerful stealth tactic for reducing the risk of injury. Here’s three ways it’s going to help you.

Stealth Tactic #1: Having fun helps people relax

That might not seem very important but laughing is the ultimate stress reliever and even a smile or a hint of a smile works. Reducing stress in a warmup helps to reduce the risk of injury by creating a lower stress starting point.

Starting with a lower stress level before we add the physical stress of a workout helps to prevent your people pushing their bodies to levels of stress they can’t handle.

For example, if you’ve got somebody in your session who’s under pressure at work, or maybe they’re having trouble in a relationship at home, their emotional stress levels will be very high. Simply adding the physical stress of a workout may push their bodies to breaking point.

But if you can add a little bit of fun or lightheartedness into their warmup, you can reduce the amount of stress on their bodies, which could be the difference between picking up a small muscle strain and not.

The thing to remember here is that it doesn’t have to be funny to be fun. Being a bit lighthearted works just as well as trying to make people laugh. Sometimes the industry gets way too serious and during the warmup is a perfect opportunity for you to just relax and have a bit of fun.

Stealth Tactic #2: Fun Creates More Focus.

We’ve all had that person in our group that just continues to mutter under their breath or talk to the person next to them while we’re trying to explain what’s going on. And then they spend the next five minutes asking everyone around them what they should be doing, because they weren’t listening.

They do this because they’re too busy thinking about their life outside of your training session, which means that they are still in high stress mode.

If they’re thinking about what their husband said that’s annoyed them or the person that cut them up on the way to training, for example, then they are in high stress mode.

This lack of focus is disruptive, not only to them, but to other people around them and it means that they don’t understand the point of the task. So, that could mean that while you’re trying to ease them into the exercise, they’re going hell for leather, because they didn’t really understand what you were talking about. And that can obviously increase the risk of injury.

Adding a little bit of lighthearted fun to your warmup, can help to increase focus because it makes them forget about the stress that they’re having in their life for a few minutes, instead bringing their attention to what’s going on right there and then in your session.

This can help to decrease the risk of injury because it allows them to listen to what you’re trying to say.

Stealth Tactic #3: Get More Social.

There’s a growing wave of evidence to support the idea that feeling connected to other human beings, really helps people reduce their anxiety levels and is even being used as a way of healing trauma now. So, making your warmups lighthearted, and involving other people where it’s possible, is a great way to help your people feel connected to each other, but also helps new people feel included into your group and accepted into your group.

A simple example of how to do this is a game I’ve used in the past that’s been really successful using high fives.

You get people walking around the room, they walk around in any direction, when they come across another person, they high five.

Gradually you introduce different variations that challenge their reactions. It could be high fives with both hands at once (high 10s), or reaching down to the ground, or only to one side of the body. Finally, the choice is theirs and without saying anything, and without one person designated to lead, they must react to each other.

Generally, there’s lots of miscommunications which makes them laugh and it’s a very quick, easy way of helping them to connect with other people, relax a little bit more and focus on what’s going on.

The big takeaway here for this article is that while lighthearted might seem like a waste of time to some people, is actually one of your most powerful stealth tactics when it comes to hacking injury… and it just goes to prove how you can reduce in the risk of injury in five minutes without having to learn complicated anatomy.

If you really want to know how to make this work for you, then do yourself a favour and come and join us in the injury hacking Facebook community over at injuryhackers.com so you can get more tips, tricks, and tactics to help injuries become a thing of the past for everyone, you coach.

Originally published at https://www.mostmotionblog.com on February 1, 2022.