It’s practically impossible to prevent injury, so I like the term injury resistance, that is our focus should be to make athletes more resistant to injury. This can be from a macro-movement to a micro-tissue level, and the topic of injury resistance will be a focus of ensuing posts.

I want to take a macro approach with injury resistance and integrate it with the concept of movement variability. We spend a lot of time perfecting technique in the gym (squat, clean, etc.), whereas out in the real world of sport you would never see the perfect squat. The squat pattern in a sporting context would have 100+ different looks, off balanced, legs split in all directions, trunk twisted and flexed, athletes knocking you, etc.

Given such variability in the “real world”, what about preparing our athletes in the gym, and introducing a smorgasbord of movement variability? What could that squat pattern look like, to get greater agonist, antagonist, synergistic and fixator (muscular) contribution?

Do you think such an approach is more likely to better prepare athletes for training and competition, and make them more resistant to injury?