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Five Ways To Prevent Sports Injuries
by Paul Ingraham
Weekend warriors and a lot of amateur athletes tend to believe that injury prevention is pretty much all about having a stretching regimen, and they are usually feeling guilty about not doing it enough. If I had a buck for every time I’ve heard someone say, just before a game of ultimate, “I should really do some stretching” … well, heck, I could afford to play ultimate for a living.
Lucky for them, they aren’t really missing anything important. As established elsewhere, stretching doesn’t really work (see Quite a Stretch) for the things people think it does, and it is particularly useless at preventing injury. Here are five ways to prevent injury that are a much better use of your time …
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Are Kettlebells Safe?
Are Kettlebells safe? I’m curious to hear your thoughts.
RTS:
Kettlebells by themselves have never hurt anybody. They don’t explode and spew shrapnel. They don’t roll down the street and squash babies in their strollers. They are inanimate objects that sit on the floor/rack and have never intentionally with premeditation attacked a single soul. It’s what people DO with kettlebells that may be the benefit… or the detriment, as is often the case!
Most so-called experts that devise the exercises have no clue about the body (joint tolerances) nor the device (moment arm and inertial properties) and therefore, in an attempt to make a “rock’n workout” often sacrifice their followers along the way. Read the rest of this entry
A Stretching Experiment
I am a skeptic, known for my criticisms of stretching. However, I do enjoy stretching, and even I believe that diligent stretching can increase flexibility, because that’s the one effect of stretching that research has backed up. So for thirty days this summer I optimistically stretched my hamstrings — an experiment in the “lab of me.” I was truly disciplined: four full minutes of intense stretching per leg, per day. I did every stretch in a piping hot steam room, which is usually considered an ideal circumstance for stretching, whether that is true or not. What happened? Read the rest of this entry