High performance demands heavy workloads but loading increases the risk of ‘overuse’ injury. How can clinicians and strength & conditioning (S&C) coaches find the happy medium? Or is it time to take a different view? Perhaps INCREASING training load will make tissues more resilient and injury LESS likely.

Dr Tim Gabbett (www.gabbettperformance.com) bridges sports medicine and S&C as a performance consultant and a recognized applied researcher. In the BJSM spotlight he shares what physiotherapists can learn from S&C coaches and argues for the concept of the ‘performance physiotherapist’. Similarly, he translates S&C secrets for physios – insights to progressing sport specific game demands within the rehabilitation program using a rugby example. We ask him about the high-tech and low-tech equipment to gauge how much players are doing and how to titrate their training dose.

The latter part of the podcast focuses on how greater training loads can make players less likely to suffer injury but match demands must be considered. “High training loads are not necessarily the problem, it is how you get there that can damage players”. The internationally-recognized Gabbett closes by outlining the concept of ‘training stress balance’ – the net difference between fitness (long-term training load) and fatigue (short-term training load). When the player is in ‘positive’ balance, (i.e, the short-term load is lower than the longer term level of load the player is adapted to) injury is very unlikely. However, when this pattern is reversed, such as when a player is attempting to rapidly ‘gain fitness’ after a layoff, injury is almost inevitable. Cricket fast bowling data provides compelling evidence for this novel concept.

Link to Dr Tim Gabbett’s home page: www.gabbettperformance.com

In case you don’t get to check Dr Gabbett’s bio, he is in that rare group of individuals with two PhDs – one in human physiology (2000), the other in the applied science of professional football (2011). He has worked with players in many Olympic Games cycles and published over 150 papers. http://gabbettperformance.com.au/profile/

The BJSM paper relating to ‘training stress balance’: Spikes in acute workload are associated with increased injury risk in elite cricket fast bowlers. Hulin BT, Gabbett TJ, ….Orchard JW. Br J Sports Med. 2014 Apr;48(8):708-12