Concussions can lead to lower leg injuries?

Fascinating research makes sense

Tom Haberstroh has important concussion insight, just published on Yahoo! He talked to neuroscientist Chris Nowinski, who is the founder and CEO of the Concussion & CTE Foundation.

The first note is that the 48 hours the NBA mandates concussed players to sit out is not a science-backed amount of time to heal.

“While [the two-day layoff] is understandable,” Nowinski said, “I don’t know if the NBA has gotten burned yet by having a 48-hour rule. The day will come when someone returned too soon and has a second injury, whether to a brain injury or a lower extremity injury, because their balance was off or reaction time was off, or moving in a way they wouldn’t have moved otherwise.”

For a 7-4 center who slaloms like a guard around a forest of defenders, the potential for a downstream injury can’t be ignored. According to a 2021 study, NBA players were almost five times more likely to sustain an acute lower-extremity musculoskeletal injury within 90 days of return-to-play following a concussion compared to players who did not suffer a concussion.

That makes me think about this video:

That’s a then-college soccer player who grew up training at the facility, P3, that I wrote a book about called Ballistic. I’ve seen NBA players ooh and aah over that video—it’s perfect jumping.

What I hope you’ll notice is the title that someone at P3 gave this video: “nervous system training.”

This gets to the core of what I learned in my years researching and writing this book. Injuries, by and large, are not caused by tissue and muscle things that we can find on x-rays and MRIs. They’re most commonly caused by how we move, which is abundantly clear to everyone with a giant database of athletic human movement. That’s where the gold is.

I lived this. In the middle of writing Ballistic, I fell victim to a debilitating shitstorm of lower back pain. I could barely drive a car or sit at a desk. And then, long story short, P3 assessed me, figured out the movements that were causing my trouble, and assigned me rigorous and weird new training that within a year made me feel good enough to compete in Hyrox, if you know what that is.

A lot of my training, and the training for everyone at P3, is low-key brain training. Watch how that guy lands in that video. His toes are up, he’s landing on the balls of his feet so that the force of impact passes swiftly and efficiently into the big strong built-for-it tissues of his Achilles, calves, quads, and (importantly) glutes. A great many of us move … oddly … so that the force of landing gets misdirected to little backwater tissue that can’t take it.

One of my troubles was not to bend at the hips much, which shunted landing forces that might have been absorbed by my glutes instead on up the chain into my lower back. The MRI showed the destruction.

Many athletes have some twisting of the long bones, or strange foot position, which across thousands of athletes, tracked for years, reliably contributes to risk of major injury.

But of course, you can’t just stare at a row of boxes and decide to land well. You can’t elect not to let the long bones of your legs rotate, nor to suddenly get into your hips on landing. Those things are managed by your nervous system, at speeds faster you can think. (In fact, thinking hurts the process.)

You want to just move freely, and have your nervous system do those things competently.

The training, then, is to change your nervous system, to build new pathways, over time, like learning a new language. I put my hips through an incredible array of vocabulary lessons, movements and activities, and then slowly began running and jumping differently. It’s fun.

It’s also why this concussion news makes sense. In one sense impaired neurological function is the cause of the vast majority of injuries! The training to reduce injuries is largely brain training, so it makes sense that brain setbacks could come with setbacks all across the brain’s body-wide sphere of influence.

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