DucksReign wrote:

For all the hype on toughness and physicality, the injuries to Oregon this year have been perplexing...in both games and practices.

Verdell, Flowe, JJ III, Redd...season-ending just to name some. Plus other players missing multiple games.

I don't follow any team as close as I do Oregon and I have zero education / training in this subject area...but it seems like our injuries are disproportionate to what they should be. Plus our training facilities are second to none by and large.

My best layman's guess is we are so "bulked up" and "tight" there has been a sacrafice in flexibility.

Perhaps not a bad guess. I too know nothing about this, but we are seeing a lot of foot injuries. I also believe the practices are very physical...no answer, but a lot of talent on the shelf.
 

 I don't know anything about it either - just throwing this in for perspective.

Last year I read a profile of Christian McCaffery that touched on his expert training regimen, which was specially designed to prevent injury. The main reason I remember it was because not long after, I heard he'd been injured. According to SI, "McCaffrey missed a total of 13 games last year as he suffered ankle, shoulder, and groin injuries." And this year, he was out several weeks with a hamstring injury.

I'm not trying to say his program was worthless - who knows, his injuries may have been worse without it - just that there might be no way of knowing who or what (or if anything) was at fault.

Here's a portion of the article: 
"That means that he has dedicated the near entirety of his energy toward honing his body so that it can withstand the rigors of something that it was not intended to withstand. And right here, right now, I'm willing to drink the snake oil and say that he's pretty good at that honing. He's never missed a game since he was drafted in 2017. That's surely due in part to good luck, but also due to… Well, I'll let him explain:

“If I get done with training and my right hip flexor is sore, but my left is not, there's a reason. Something's off, right? So we'll check my pelvis. We'll check the psoas. We'll check my T-spine, make sure everything's moving, make sure I don't have a rib out or something's off, and we'll adjust it. The misconception about training is ‘We have to work into the ground. We have to make it extremely hard for you. You should be dead tired after.’ [But] you're actually detraining when you're working on a fatigue system. The goal is to be full speed neurally. You shouldn't play tired. You shouldn't train tired. Otherwise you're training a depleted system with poor mechanics. If I'm taking an off step, or I'm not dorsiflexing enough, or an ankle is loud, [my personal trainers] can hear it in the sequencing and timing of the sound. You can't train the way the top athletes in the world train without the correct treatment. You need both. You can't have one without the other.”

Last edited by WoodburnDuck (11/23/2021 3:07 pm)