Well most people don't realize that soccer prevention starts even before you step on the soccer field. Growing up one of the major reasons I saw injuries was from poor habits and poor decisions.
So young players who go out to the field and immediately start taking shots on goal will start seeing how their decisions will be effected when they get older and there body is more susceptible to injuries.
First off when you go out to the field you need to start warming up properly. I go into detail in this course about how to properly warm up but for the sake of helping you out make sure you do a few laps and build up your body temperature and heart rate. You should ideally start feeling beads of sweat before you even begin stretching.
You should never stretch cold muscles!
The reason for this is your muscles are made up of what's called muscle fibers. An injury occurs when a cold muscle which is tighter than a warm muscle gets stretched out quickly. This creates and overstretch in those muscle fibers and that's what makes you feel the muscle "pull."
Easy way to avoid this is to slowly warm up your muscle first.
Just like I was saying earlier about going out to the field and taking shots as hard as you can, which a lot of people do believe it or not, you are using these cold muscles to use explosive movements, which is one of the number one causes in pulls.
WARNING FOR COACHES:
I can almost guarantee that you are not letting your players get to the field early enough and letting them properly stretch before playing warm up drills. It all starts with preparation. High school coaches should let their players get to the field about 35-40 minutes ahead of time. Get a great warm up in. Then take a good 10 minutes at least stretching out those muscles.
They did a study as well on speed from U.S. National Team player Demarcus Beasley that I played against in relation to flexible muscles and how that effects your speed. Those two were found to go hand and hand. The more stretched you are before a game the quicker your muscles will trigger making you run faster and kick harder. Moreso, you will avoid major injuries.
Think of this. It might take an extra 5-10 minutes a game to avoid an injury that might take a month to fully recover from like a hamstring pull, a hip flexor, or a quad pull. You don't want that trust me. I've had almost every pull injury under the sun and it took me a while to realize this.
So take the time to stretch.
Another quick side note. I was blessed enough to have a personally family friend of mine be rated the number one sports therapist for the state of Florida. So I learned amazing knowledge of how to prevent or how to take care of injuries, and he was even voted in the trainers Hall of Fame - I didn't even know there was one.
If you have an injury your first method of treating that pull or sprain is with ice. This subsides the swelling which is extremely important because it prevents clots.
DO NOT PUT HEAT ON YOUR INJURY FOR AT LEAST 24 HOURS!
Why? Because the heat causes more blood to pump towards the injured area and when blood can't flow it'll clot. This extends the amount of time for you to heal.
Put ice on it because it slows blood flow down and especially with like ankle sprains, elevate your leg above you heart. This will additionally help your leg.
Like I said before I go into much more detail in the main course themselves but you will also learn how to become an entirely better soccer player than you probably even ever thought possible.
If any of you have an injury feel free to leave me a comment because I basically have some nice little ninja tricks from my family friend that will help cut down sprained ankle times by weeks and also prevent injuries from happening.
I'm here to help so just let me know. Here's to playing a long and injury free soccer career.
Cheers!
-Matt Smith
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