Are You Doing Enough to Keep Your Team Healthy?
It’s widely known that strength training is a key part of keeping professional athletes free of injury. Here’s a look at how the kBox can be integrated into this process.
NBA basketball over 82 games can be highly demanding. As the pre-season kicks off you’ll once again start seeing explosive athletes making sharp cuts, quick sprints and landings in all kinds of positions on a nightly basis. According to a 17-year overview of injuries in the NBA lateral ankle sprains, patellofemoral inflammation, lumbar and hamstring strains are the most frequent causes for keeping these athletes off the court.
In order to avoid falling victim to these injuries, preparation is critical and it is widely known that strength training is a key part of keeping professional athletes free of injury. The smartest training staffs are always looking for various ways to minimise the amount of time their athletes are unavailable for game action.
Curiously enough while looking through the NBA injury rates, as presented by injury analyst and athletic trainer Jeff Stotts on his blog InStreetClothes.com, we noticed that seven out of the nine least injured teams last season were in fact teams who already own at least one kBox. This also holds true when you measure the damage in salary dollars lost instead of missed games. Moreover, when looking into the data from the 2016-17 NBA season, we were still happy to see our longtime kBox users maintaining this trend.
The skilled training staffs of these teams stand out compared to the rest of the league and they obviously have a good grip on the many factors contributing to a low injury rate. It is important to have the capability to absorb large forces and maintain proper movement mechanics, whether unilaterally or bilaterally, which the kBox is a great tool for. Moreover, with flywheel training, you can target force absorption at different angles throughout the entire range of motion in any given exercise. And when it comes to glute strengthening and activation, research shows that lateral squats on the kBox are more effective than any other exercise. Not to mention that you can still use the kBox with players who are rehabbing from injuries sustained to their fingers, arms, shoulders, back and etc.
What improvements to your injury rates do you think you could get by applying flywheel training? We’d love to know.
/Bektur Savitahunov, Sales Operations Manager and Basketball Coach
PS. to learn more about the use of the kBox for basketball training, check out the video below, or head over to our basketball page.
