It’s no secret that a lot of athletes come to work with me when dealing with chronic or repetitive injuries.

They come to work with our team under the impression that everything we do will be focused on the physical aspect of performance.

That is where they believe their issues lie.

They believe that they consistently suffer injury as a result of weakness in specific joints, muscles or their entire chain.

And why this statement or belief may be partially true.

It fails to respect the other major components of performance which contribute significantly towards injury risk.

Performance in team-sports is broken down into 4 key heuristics.

Technical. Tactical. Physical. Psychological.

And even though the remits of our work often is confined to improving physical performance.

We don’t completely restrict ourselves to work in that area.

Physical performance is impacted and underpinned by psychological performance.

The mind has direct influence over your physiological state and the health of your body.

And so the body and the health of it has a direct impact over the mind.

So, if we only focus on developing the athlete in the area of physical performance.

Then we may continually fall short in our ability to return them to competition successfully.

Physical improvements only occur when we strike an appropriate balance between training and recovery.

We train the body to adapt, but that adaptation only takes place outside the hours we put in in the gym.

So, we can execute the most research-backed, up-to-date, elite physical performance program in the world, but if we don’t recover from the training, then we’re unlikely to improve whatsoever.

If our psychological state isn’t in a place where we’re actually switching off and creating an optimal environment for recovery, then we’re really pulling in two different directions.

Likewise, if we’re not fueling our body appropriately to recover from our training, then the work that we do may actually be putting our athletes at increased risk of injury. Rather than actually increasing their tolerance to load and preparing them for the demands of their sport upon their return.

If our athletes aren’t sleeping well, then again their injury risk is likely consistently at elevated levels. And that is unlikely to change, unless we can identify a solution to that problem as well.

So, even though we have become experts in physical preparation to underpin performance, that doesn’t mean that the most valuable work that we do always lies in that area for each and every athlete. 

This is what has led to our development of a multi-disciplinary team around each athlete that comes through our doors.

S&C, Physiotherapy, Sport Psychology & Performance Nutrition.

We don’t hang our hat on any one discipline being more important than another.

We identify what is the lowest hanging fruit for each athlete and we focus our expertise on improving that area.

We identify what is the rate limiter towards improvements in their physical performance and we attempt to address it.

And many athletes that come to work with us already train pretty hard.

They already may have tried to push their body to its absolute limits in the gym.

But maybe they have some blind spots that they haven’t addressed because they haven’t thought them important enough to do so.

It is our job to find those blind spots.

Regardless of where they are.

Poor sleep hygiene and regularity.

Negative self-talk.

Self-limiting beliefs.

Inadequate fueling.

Big spikes in volume as a result of poor training frequency.

It doesn’t matter what the athlete’s biggest issue is.

Everything impacts everything.

It’s our job to find out what’s holding back everything.

So that everything can improve.

And our athlete’s rate of progress can finally begin to trend upwards again.

That is why it is important to look at the bigger picture.

As well as the detail that goes into each and every microcosm that impacts our athlete’s performance.