Injury Prevention & Management
Katy Johansson With Diana Roberts
What is athletic training?
By Diana Roberts
Athletic training is a specialty field in health care. It is comprised
of certified professionals who help prevent and treat athletic injuries. Athletic training allows athletes to reach their greatest potential.
What are the benefits?
The athletic training model optimizes performance, helps prevent injuries, assesses and treats athletic injuries, and develops programs that return athletes to their sport as quickly and safely as possible.
Optimizing performance includes performing a musculoskeletal assessment to identify strength or flexibility imbalances that alter sport specific biomechanics. By identifying these issues up front, there is much less chance of overuse injuries later.
What if an injury does occur?
If injury does occur, then our model allows for early recognition and treatment of injuries. This approach decreases healing time, and returns the athlete quickly and safely as possible to their sport.
I frequently ask athletes if it is more important to get to the starting line or the finish line. The answer is straightforward. If getting to the start line is interrupted by injury, the finish line is unattainable. Preventing injuries before they start is the best approach!
What is the primary cause of injury?
A recent study showed that the number one cause of injury was training error. A close second is strength and flexibility imbalances that can lead to biomechanical compensation which results in overuse injury. Therefore, our focus is to train smart and identify issues that stand in the way of optimum performance at the very beginning of the training cycle.
About the Author: Diana Roberts graduated from the University of Health Sciences Chicago Medical School and has been in the athletic training profession for 30 years. Diana is also a physical therapist.
She provides the following services: athletic training, bike fitting, running and biomechanical assessment. She is also a certified athletic trainer, Bike Fitter, and USAT triathlon coach and offers services in each of these areas.
Diana has helped the Seattle Mariners, Seattle Seahawks, and other professional teams. She has also worked with novice and Olympic athletes as well as everyone else in between.
As an athlete, Diana has also participated in endurance sports, for the past 30 years, including the Boston, Chicago and New York marathons, 13 Ironman triathlons and many cycling events.