WTF is “Load Management"?

Since the turn of the century, the San Antonio Spurs are the winningest team in the NBA. No doubt, a lot of their success can be attributed to having had a bevy of current and future Hall of Famers on their rosters. But perhaps no single person has been more influential in their success than head coach (and famous curmudgeon) Gregg Popovich.

Under Popovich, the Spurs have run off a stretch of 18 straight 50-win seasons and 22 consecutive playoff appearances. Obviously, Popovich is a brilliant basketball strategist; you don’t win that many games by accident. But his brilliance appears to extend off the court, too -- specifically, to the human body and its need for rest and recovery. (Note: he likely also has the help of a world-class sports medicine team.)

Case in point: in 2012 Popovich famously rested his four best players on the night of a nationally televised game. It was an unfortunate decision for fans around the country who were stuck watching the Spurs’ B-squad. Although the Spurs ended up losing the game, the move proved to be the right one for them in the long-run. They won the championship that season.

The Keys to Unlocking Explosive Power

It wasn’t too long ago that athletes, parents, and coaches believed strength training made you slow and inflexible. To avoid these supposed undesirable effects, athletes steered clear of weights like the plague.

Over the years, we’ve come to debunk these myths. We now recognize the myriad benefits of strength training for sports performance, from injury prevention to increased positional endurance and improved speed and power -- the subject of this post.

Most of us have a general idea of what power is. We know it when we see it. But it’s not entirely intuitive how strength affects power.

To appreciate the relationship between strength and power, we must first understand that strength is equivalent to the ability to produce force, and speed is the expression of strength quickly (i.e. at high movement velocity).

The (Inconvenient) Truth About the FMS and Injury Rates

The Functional Movement Screen (FMS) is a series of seven bodyweight tests designed to rate human movement quality/competency. Each test on the FMS is scored on a 0-3 scale. A perfect total or "composite score" would be 21 points.

The FMS's relationship with injury has been studied extensively in athletes. The thinking is that scoring low on the FMS (usually 14 points or lower) puts an athlete at increased risk for injury, which the research bears out to an extent.

When all the studies were pooled together (in 2015), scoring 14 or below did increase injury risk by about 50%. However, for every 100 athletes that got injured, the FMS only managed to correctly identify about 25 of them as being at risk. For this reason, the FMS should not be used to predict which athletes will get injured on an individual basis.

Despite the fairly conclusive evidence against the FMS's ability to predict injury, new studies keep coming out investigating this same tired research question. In the past two years alone there have been at least nine such studies on rugby, soccer, cricket, handball, volleyball, and basketball players.

Based on this continued proliferation of research, clearly not everyone has gotten the memo about the FMS's inability to predict injury. For this reason - and in an attempt to help put this issue to rest - my colleagues and I just published a critical review of the FMS. I break down the results of our review below.

How to Train More Without Getting Hurt [SimpliFaster]

Training for peak performance is tricky business. Push too hard, and you get hurt. Don’t push hard enough, and you still get hurt (from being unprepared for the rigors of competition).

Luckily, there’s a new way to measure how hard you’re working. And amazingly, the research shows it actually protects against injury. That’s right: sports scientists have finally figured out How to Train More Without Getting Hurt.

I break down all the latest research -- and show how to implement it -- in my brand new article for SimpliFaster:

https://simplifaster.com/articles/train-more-without-injuries/