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 act…