Dr Brandon Marcello - Eccentric training

Brandon Marcello talks about the necessity to incorporate eccentric training in the sports preparation process.

Extract:

Why do we need {eccentric training}?  Well it’s simple, what’s the goal of every training program? It’s to decrease potential for injury, to improve performance and then to educate and explain to the athlete why we’re doing it, how it’s going to make them better and how it’s going to transfer to their sport and allow them to achieve the goals that they hope to achieve.

Some interesting stats: {...} athletes with a history of reoccurring hamstring and adductor muscles injuries {...}, they have a greater than two-fold impairment of their eccentric strength compared to their concentric strength. {...} I don’t know if {...} that injury causes that impairment or if the impairment causes the injury, but at the end of the day it’s something which is very interesting that if we have a mismatch between eccentric and concentric strength, there might be a potential for injury or there might have been an injury in the past, but it’s something {...} to look at. 

And that goes back to why these strain injuries occur: strain injuries occur when the muscle and tendon can’t maintain the tension placed upon them and then, all of a sudden, the fibers within the muscle are disrupted, and that causes the classic strain injury.  That has to do with loading, and what happens here, like I said, the muscle cannot handle the amount of forces that it’s being asked to dissipate and something happens; it’s not ready to handle these decelerating forces and bad things happen, typically the strain, wherever it is: hamstring, adductor, quad {...}.