The global race to increase performance and reduce injuries is at, what feels like, a peak. The last number of years have seen a radical explosion in the amount of data available to sports scientists but has this information made us smarter? And is it making our teams healthier? 

As professionals in sports today we are bombarded with the next big thing, the next dataset and the piece of gold that is going to solve all of our problems. Technology companies continue to make huge claims about the % change they can make with a team and the reduction in injuries that are possible.

It would seem that if these claims were true then injury rates would be rapidly declining across sport worldwide.

However when we look at injury rates across the top leagues and sports worldwide, injuries are continuing to rise! Does this mean that these technologies are not worthwhile? The educated answer is that it’s not as simple as yes or no.

To decide whether something is worthwhile or valuable we need to figure out how we want to assess it and how we are going to use it.

My belief in the modern age of Sport Science is that we forget to stop and think about what it is we are trying to achieve and, when I say this, I don’t mean globally but very specifically. Yes, all teams want to prevent injuries but how many of us spend time getting detailed and specific about this.

– How many teams actually understand the most prevalent injuries within their teams?

– How many of us know exactly how many of these injuries have occurred and how long they last?

– How many of us understand the mechanism of each one of these injuries and whether they all happened in the same way or not?

– How many of us know the retrospective training demands on each of the athletes who sustained this type of injury and how the athletes had responded to these demands in the build up to these injuries?

Read the full article at KitmanLabs.com 

Written by Stephen Smith | CEO at Kitman Labs