The best way to prevent injuries in any sport is to take a TRUE Offseason. In the offseason, you should be focused on strength training and fixing those nagging issues your athlete has had over the season. Soccer is one of those sports at the youth level- it’s really all year round. Below are some helpful tips on simple hip prehab exercise and how you can avoid injuries from occurring.
Hip Mobility Training - A Simple Way to Help Avoid Other Injuries From Occurring
Many of our soccer athletes will come into The Sports Pod and say “I hurt it just by playing soccer”, but the root issue is tight hips due to not smashing or stretching after agility training. Later with playing soccer every single day, with unsupervised weight training, with no rest day. That is the perfect recipe for hip and low back injuries.
Building a student-athlete is no different than building a big beautiful house. If you build that house on a foundation of sand, inevitably everything you build on that foundation will fall apart. The basic foundation of athletic development is mobility, movement efficiency in their respective sports, and proper strength and conditioning form.
Helpful Tips That Decreases the Risk of Other Injuries
A great example of movement efficiency is running in soccer. So many coaches will focus on the ball handling, juggling, and strength training, but the one thing that all Soccer players will do 95% of the time. There are three ways you can be more efficient at running, 1. Increasing stride length.2. Stride frequency 3. Strength in the lower body. Actually, the fourth variable is like perfecting the running technique. Think about Olympic Sprinters focusing their entire lives to run the hundred-meter dash. Just because we can inherently run it doesn’t mean that we’re doing it correctly. In most cases, the knee issue or quad strain comes from the inability to move his hip very well.
When the hips don’t move your low back will have to take some of the issues. It never surprises me when a soccer player will come in with low back pain. The same thing happens to the knee joint. That’s because the hip joint is a ball and socket joint and when you don’t have mobility in that area, the knee joint can handle so much. It’s a hinge joint, you can’t ask the hinge joint to be a ball and socket joint. When you do there will inevitably be knee pain. This is why knee issues like Meniscus tears are so common.
The easiest way to prevent all of these issues from happening is to be faster, to be quicker, to be more agile, to prevent quad strains, and hamstring strains is to work on your hips. Literally just spending five minutes a day, every single day, working on your hips and you would dramatically decrease your risk of an injury down here or in this lumbar spine area.
