Here we go again

[Pete Cresswell]

I was going to set up a new thread, but since we're talking about injuries in this one, here's my update on injury stats:

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Rugby's Better proved remarkably resilient last season, only picking up 11 injuries through the season (1 every 2.5 days on average), a welcome respite after suffering 21 injuries (1 every 1.3 days) in the previous season. Overall over the last 5 seasons the team has averaged an injury every 1.8 days (or 16 per season). Note that team management try to avoid:
a) Over playing - 1 match per player per day where possible
b) Over training - on average we try to give each player 1 of each type of regular training, though that's increased for players who've been involved in friendly matches which are less taxing on conditioning
c) Low-condition work - we try to ensure all players who start matches have >90% condition, and never train anyone who's below 80% condition.

The team is quite successful at farming green packs (as well as reds - seeing as on average we use 160 of them per season! That's 10 per injury). Hence we do power-train selected players. However, we try to only do this on days where the team has only 1 serious match (we organise 1 friendly on those days)

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Looking at where injuries happen, as a broad trend there's an 18% chance (almost 1 in 5) that you'll get an injury in any given match. And in training injuries seem broadly proportional to the condition loss involved - approaching 1 in every 12 practice matches, 1 in 18 cardio and 1 in 40 stretching.




Ankle strains are far and away the most common injury, followed by minor hamstring strains - and given that they're not as serious that's a good thing!