Our take on the New York Times Hip Injury Article

So what were your thoughts as you read through the New York Times Article from a few days ago? Personally I just had to laugh. The sports training community seems to always be chasing its tail in my opinion. This article was a perfect example of this. First they realized with the rash of knee injuries that have now plagued professional sports for the last decade or more that they needed to strengthen the knees. Good idea but once again I have to go back to the fact that they never fully answered the question of “Why?”

My wife was teasing me the other day when I got frustrated with my kids constantly asking me why whenever I would answer a question for them. As usual she was right since that is what I constantly do. If you had to ask the question of why were the athletes suffering so many knee injuries you could arrive at a couple of simple solutions. The simplest of which would be to say they were simply not strong enough.

So what we are saying is that athletes who train for hours on end, take their bodies through vigorous forms of exercise within their training and their sport simply just had weak knees. How would that be possible. Would you say that of a gymnast who spent 6 hours a day training on balance beams, the parallel bars, the high bars, the rings and then a few hundred handstands for good measure had shoulder injuries because they were too weak?

This simply just does not make sense to me. If they are capable of training at such a high level would imply to me that in fact they do have enough strength and that the pain must be originating from some other issue.

Next, the article goes on to talk about how athletes or their strength coaches began working on strengthening their quads and hamstrings to bolster the knees are now suffering hip injuries as a result of lack of training in the hips.

They are right that this is why they are having problems in the hips, however, what they do not understand is that the knee injuries were also from a lack of training in the hips. Honestly every workout you do needs to involve a significant amount of hip work. The hips are the foundation of the body and are the only joint in the body that can directly impact every other joint.

The Femurs (long bone in the upper leg) are directly impacted by what is going on in the hips. Also the lumbar spine’s position is completely determined my the angle in your pelvis.

In the next post on this I want to give you a few examples of this visually with the help of some of our athletes. In the meantime just remember that if you want to have a durable body regardless of if you are someone who gardens to a pro athlete, you must always train for muscular efficiency. This means giving your muscular system, all of your muscular system the necessary stimulus it needs everyday to perform its job.