Why you're alway injuring yourself at tournaments
by Niko RapottnigWe all know the feeling. It’s the first tournament of the new season. You’re excited because you have a few new players, and your new zone might just be the missing link you’ve been looking for. Everything seems to finally fall into place. The first game goes by, and you’re feeling good. After the second game, you’re feeling your legs a little, but it’s no biggie. Then fate strikes, as it always seems to do. You’re streaking deep after completely burning your matchup. The disc goes up, you’re chasing, you can reach it...POP. You catch the disc, and your teammates storm the field to celebrate with you. But something is wrong. As you toss the disc toward the goal line, you reach for the back of your leg. Hammie. Again.
“I might be able to play,” you think to yourself, but deep down, you know what this means. And as if it’s Groundhog Day, you carry that injury all the way through the season, leaving you with that all-too-familiar feeling: “Ahh, if I don’t injure myself next season, I’ll be unstoppable.” But that season never comes, does it?
So why does this happen? Why can’t we seem to catch a break? The answer, as you might expect, has multiple reasons, but I’m going to focus on the one I find most important:
Load Management
You might have heard the term before, perhaps in the context of pro athletes sitting out games to conserve energy. That’s one part of the picture. In Ultimate terms, this would be the equivalent of splitting playing time between players on a roster to ensure everyone is fresh during the latter parts of a game or tournament. This is important. But the more overlooked aspect of load management happens long before we even take a step on the field.
How do we prepare ourselves for the physical demands of Ultimate? First, we need to examine what those demands actually look like. Numerous scientific studies have tried to answer this exact question. By equipping players with GPS trackers, they measure every sprint, every cut, and the exact heart rate to give us an insight into the so-called "external and internal load." But you don’t even need to read these studies to understand the underlying problem: You practice twice a week for one and a half hours. Then you go out to tournaments, where you play 5–6 games of equal length and likely higher intensity. That’s a 200% increase in workload. According to science, we’re entering the danger zone when we increase our workload by more than 50%【1】. So, you don’t need a PhD in sports science to understand why this is an issue.
If you’re planning on doing things differently this time, here are a few actionable tips:
Start your offseason early. Take some time off after the season to let your body heal and to get your mind off Ultimate, but don’t wait too long. You’ll need time to build up the necessary volume.
Increase your workload gradually. Aim for a 10–20% increase per week. Think about what that means: If you practice once per week in the winter and then start your season training twice per week, that’s a 100% increase in workload. Build up to it by going on light runs, doing plyometric exercises, general strength training, and sprint workouts.
Sprint once per week. All-out sprinting (like in the example from the introduction) is probably the highest level of strain we need to prepare for. Even better than building back up to sprinting is never stopping in the first place. This means hitting your top-end velocity once per week—5–10 meters (or yards) at full intensity.
If you stick to these simple principles, you’ll be in a whole different spot when the season begins. You’ve got this!
References
[1] Gabbett, T., 2016. The training—injury prevention paradox: should athletes be training smarter and harder?._British Journal of Sports Medicine_, 50(5), pp.273-280.
About the author:Niko Rapottnig is a Sports-Performance-Coach from Vienna, Austria. He holds a masters degree in exercise-science and has been working in elite sports for over 5 years.