Coaches Corner

This is a simple story on how to reduce time lost due to injury. I was originally going to call it 'what is proof?'. But then I remembered that sometimes I like people to actually read my posts, so I gave it a catchier, but far less clever title. I'm in a group on Facebook for coaches around the world and someone posted a question recently suggesting a football (soccer) coach stopping players from trying to kick the ball really hard, because it will increase their risk of injury. My response was that they were right, it will increase the risk of injury, but kicking hard is important so the solution is actually to make sure the child is physically able to kick hard without injury. I went on to say that can be done with some simple movement exercises 5 minutes at the beginning of practice, and 3 minutes at the end, every time (the durations are largely irrelevant, the point is regular, small periods of time). Their response was completely reasonable. They asked fo