Five Simple Ways to Beat Overuse Injuries

Keep your players fresh and injury free by adding variety and changing things up. Here are some easy-to-implement ideas that will pay off big in healthy play and keeping injuries away.

How to make your dynamic warm-up into an ACL injury prevention warm-up

Dynamic warm-ups are the norm for teams getting ready to play, but they’re not enough to address the high risk for ACL injuries that exists for female high school athletes today. To do that, we need to include ACL injury prevention exercises. There is strong evidence that well-structured ACL injury prevention warm- ups work. They […]

Add Injury Prevention to Your Dynamic Warm-Up in 2 Minutes

Are you doing all you can to protect your players from tearing their ACLs? Instituting a regular dynamic warm-up is an important first step toward keeping our athletes healthy. In my last post, The Dynamic Warm up, Why Do it?, we looked at the three primary reasons players need to warm up. If you don’t have a fixed warm-up, […]

The Dynamic Warm-Up, Why Do it?

This week I met with a group of high school basketball players starting their pre-season conditioning. They headed straight for the end line to start warm-ups, and then … waited for me to tell them what to do. Me: Do you have a standard warm up? Players: (looking at each other) Uh, not really. Me: […]

The Killer Dynamic Warm Up in 5 Simple Steps

Confused about getting your dynamic warm up right? It’s the first thing I do with every youth team, no matter the sport, is make sure they perform a complete dynamic warm up before every practice and every game. A regular dynamic warm up, done with dedication and proper form, has been shown to reduce the chance […]

Could Kyah Simon’s ACL Tear Have Been Prevented?

Another one bites the dust. This time it’s Kyah Simon, 22-year-old Australian striker and Boston Breakers star, who tore her ACL just minutes after coming on for the Matildas in their friendly against the U.S. Women’s National Team on October 20. This one deserves special attention because she had just entered the contest. Some will ask, was […]

Dynamic Warm up for Soccer Players

Schedule time for dynamic warm up, skills training and play at every practice. Here are the first 2 phases of warm up: Gathering  – when they arrive, have something for them to get started with. Otherwise, girls will chat and await instructions. Boys will see how far they can kick it into the woods. A team […]

Soccer Stretch: Dynamic Before, Static After

I get this question a lot: should they stretch? YES Follow up question: when and how? Before and after. Here’s how. Before practice they should perform a dynamic warm up, moving the body parts to be used in a controlled and increasingly intense manner. That means: forward, backward, at angles, in rotations, at increasing pace […]