Throw at Your Own Risk
The journey of an athlete is ultimately limited by two things:
Being good enough to be given the opportunity to continue.
Staying healthy enough to withstand the stimulus necessary to adapt.
In this sense, the athlete's journey draws many parallels to that of Icarus. Fly too close to the sun, and your wings will burn up from the heat. Take the safe route and fly low, and risk inevitably being swallowed up by the ever rising waves of mediocrity.
“Heittaminen Omalla Vastuula!” Finnish for “Throw at Your Own Risk!”
The big issue with injury mitigation in the current training space is that the majority of coaches and athletes are significantly more biased toward deterministic thinking rather than probabilistic thinking.
This probabilistic thinking needs to be rooted in a fundamental understanding of the difference between ergodic and non-ergodic systems. In an ergodic system, such as rolling a six-sided die, the time average of a single trajectory equals the ensemble average. Every possible outcome will eventually be rolled on principle, and the average outcome will converge to the expected value (3.5).
In a non-ergodic system—such as player development or investing—individual time path matters. You don’t have unlimited rolls of the dice, and there needs to be account taken for absorbing states (outcomes from which recovery is limited), such as a career-ending injury or bankruptcy.
The probabilistic thinking of a player development department working on a larger scale should bias toward a more ergodic model on this spectrum, while the individual coach and athlete, on a smaller scale, should more accurately reflect the more variable, non-ergodic conditions of the individual.
Either way, both the system and individual need to be in alignment about the player's current and projected future value, and the amount of risk necessary to return the value needed to continue.
There’s a reason the biggest charlatans in the training space are always yammering about injuries being completely preventable. Through willful ignorance or plain stupidity, they've taken a deterministic view that doesn’t reflect reality. Injuries are, and always will be, a part of high-level sport.
The job of the practitioner, then, is to build and modify the risk–reward portfolio to accurately reflect the stimulus needed for growth.
“If you want to be healthy, don’t compete… the very best athletes have to push themselves into unhealthy territory to force their bodies to adapt. I'm not encouraging anyone to go out and intentionally hurt yourself or compromise your health, but I am saying that you will absolutely hurt yourself competing at a very high level, both in competition and in training… If you're trying to become a professional athlete and you're not consistently taking your body somewhere it's never been before, I hate to be the one to break it to you, my friend, but you're not going to get there.” - Stan Efferding
At the end, the grim reaper of the absorption state lies waiting for every athlete. But the ultimate American ideal is in calculated risk-taking while facing the reaper at the door.
Happy Hunting
