Let your kid climb that tree

How do we really reduce injuries?

Over there on the right is a just-published article I wrote for the Atlantic.

More than a decade ago, I began a project digging deep into what we can do to prevent the injuries that ruin elite sports.

You don’t need me to tell you it’s an epidemic in the NBA, which—according to one expert, at least—is a sport with a 100 percent injury rate.

That culminated in the new book Ballistic, which has good news. It turns out, a revolution is underway.

We once went thousands of years with no clear idea about how to prevent heart attacks—we essentially thought they were acts of God. Then some geniuses created a device to see the blood flow through the heart, and it became clear that heart attacks came after years of blood flow through the heart’s arteries slowing down. Now we treat heart attacks long before they happen; it’s one of the most successful medical interventions in human history.

Similarly, we tend to think that Achilles tears, ACL tears, hamstring strains, and ruined lower backs are acts of God. People actually say those words, still.

But in fact, with the right tools, the most devastating sports injuries communicate themselves years before they occur, just like heart attacks. The right tool is not an MRI or an x-ray, it’s granular movement data, gathered with carefully prescribed aggressive movements, force plates in the floor, and infrared cameras in the ceiling. Marcus Elliott M.D. and his team at the Peak Performance Project (P3) are a decade into mastering the lessons of those tools and that dataset. It’s exciting.

So why am I writing about kids climbing trees? Even among elite athletes like NBA players, P3 finds a ton of athletes arrive with high-risk movement issues. Maybe they have feet that are weak and uncoordinated in hitting the ground, or hips that are unstable or weak—things that can lead to the worst NBA injuries.

Why is that? How can you train your butt off as an athlete and get to the NBA without good hips or ankles? The answer seems to be that nowadays a lot of us have poor movement vocabularies. Good movement, it turns out, is a skill, a kind of intelligence, that takes honing and practice—just like language. And, like language, its best learned young.

What do you call it when young people explore and hone their movement vocabularies?

They call it play.

That’s what we don’t do enough of, at any age. We’re too still. That is, in the view of many experts I have spoken to, the long-term fix to our sports injury epidemic. Play. More play. That’s why I wrote an article for the Atlantic, that I hope you’ll read, about kids climbing trees.

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