Injury Prevention Doesn’t Mean Injury-Proof

Why Injury Prevention Matters

Athletes, professional organizations, and everyday active people are always looking for ways to prevent injuries, and why not? Injuries hurt, interrupt training, and take you away from the sports and activities you enjoy. For teams and organizations, injuries can also mean reduced performance and financial loss. Because of this, there’s constant attention on injury prevention strategies, from training methods to recovery tools. But can injuries truly be prevented? Yes, but no. Unfortunately, you can do everything right and still get injured.

How Injury Prevention Programs Work

At the larger population level, the FIFA 11+ is a clear example of how we can prevent injuries. Across multiple studies and systematic reviews, this program of warm-up exercises and drills has been shown to lower injury rates, particularly for the lower extremity and severe injuries in soccer players. The biggest benefits are seen when teams consistently perform the program, reinforcing that injury prevention is less about finding the perfect exercise or tool, and more about regularly exposing athletes to strength, balance, coordination, and sport-specific movement demands over time.

Organizations can prevent injuries through rule changes and mandating protective equipment. Major League Baseball implemented two significant rule changes to prevent collisions at second base and home plate through the Chase Utley Rule and Buster Posey Rule, respectively. Unsurprisingly, facial injuries increase in hockey when players are no longer required to wear full face cages.

How Athletes Reduce Injury Risk

Individuals can also take steps to prevent injuries themselves. The entire premise behind load management is to gradually expose and progress an activity in order to drive positive adaptations and prevent overuse injuries. Exercise and resistance training should, in theory, increase our overall fitness, strength and tolerance for load so that we have increased capacity for the stress of physical activity and sports.

Why You Can Still Get Injured Doing Everything Right

Ultimately, though, we’re never going to be able to prevent all injuries. Injuries are multifactorial, and even if you’re doing everything right, random stuff can still happen. You can roll your ankle in a divot while running, fall funny on your shoulder in a rugby tackle, or accidentally collide with a teammate on the hurling pitch. In a more indirect way, stresses with work and/or family may compound with your activity stress and make you more prone to an overload injury, or you might overstretch your progression and end up with an aching knee. These are all things that can result in an acute or chronic injury that are either out of our control or inadvertent. Even in the studies looking at the FIFA 11+, there were still injuries that occurred to those who completed the program.

Is Injury “Prevention” the Right Word?

Part of this discussion may come down to semantics. “Prevent" implies stopping something from happening entirely, which is why many people in sports medicine prefer terms like injury mitigation or risk reduction instead. But even those terms have limitations because injuries are unpredictable and multifactorial. Still, if an intervention group in a study experiences 0.7 injuries per 1000 training hours compared to 1.3 in the control group, it’s reasonable to say injuries were reduced or prevented at the population level, even if we can’t predict who specifically would have been injured.

Injuries certainly can be prevented, but you can do everything right and still get injured. This is because injuries are multifactorial, and we often don’t know exactly which factors contributed to them. It certainly makes sense to take reasonable measures to prevent injuries, but injuries from sports and physical activity are a reality and not something we are going to be able to eliminate completely. The best we can do is physically prepare for the demands of the activity, progress appropriately, recover well outside of sport, and stay as healthy as possible.