Considerations For Fall Athletes During COVID-19 Justin: Good Morning everybody. So happy Saturday of Memorial day weekend. I don’t know if I hope I’m not alone in this cause then I’ll be embarrassed, but I completely did not realize that Monday was Memorial day. and then all of a sudden it sort of hit me that, that it was so hopefully, everyone is having a good start to their Memorial day weekend minus the really, really big rainstorms out there. John: That’s all right. We can use it now. Ashley: Yesterday. Justin was watering the lawn here, and I’m like, it’s gonna rain tomorrow. John: I kinda just put your hand in like basically like the Christmas vacation outfit with like the bunny slippers in the robe and a hat, just like waving the hose on the Lake Ashley: or on the tractor driving around the neighborhood. John: Oh, okay. Yeah, that’ll do it. Ashley: Oh man. Justin: Watering the neighborhood or just. Ashley: I mean, he’s doing everything around the neighborhood, so if anybody needs a tractor for hire, I’m pretty sure that we could do that. Justin: I like it. Good. All right. Well we wanted to jump on really quick and talk this morning about some of the considerations that our fall athletes should rethinking about. John had written a blog post about this a couple of weeks ago and we’re going to have a follow up coming soon. but we wanted to chat a little bit about some of the things. I know there’s a lot up in the air right now. Then there was an article the other day published about like what would have to happen if there was going to be false sports and, that was super entertaining. but I, John: and I don’t even want to tell you what we’ve been hearing from some of the coaches from the colleges Ashley: H remark, like, just the stuff that we’re hearing is remarkable. Like. Screens in between lockers. John: That was the big one. So the teams can practice together and they can tackle each other, but in the locker room, they have to have plexiglass screens in between Ashley: players on a bench, even though they’re going on the field when they come off, the field has to be masked and sitting six feet apart. John: Yeah, Justin: I did see that one. Yeah, that was kind of interesting. I also saw something about, the people in the, Oh boy, what happened? Are we still good? Ashley: Looks like we’re still good. Unless it cut off. Justin: No. All right. I’m okay then. Okay. there we go. That’s better. The, yeah, some of the, you know, some of that stuff is crazy. And then some of the rules about like, you know, disinfecting a ball if more than one person are going to touch it. I think pretty much we determined that golf had the best chance of occurring like normal. other than that, I don’t know. You know what, how they’re going to manage all that John: stuff. Well, I know it obviously depends on, well the budgeting thing is going to be a nightmare, but like some of the German leagues for soccer, these things have been starting back up where they’re placing just like a plethora of balls around the field so that you know, a player doesn’t have to go into like, cause let’s be honest, in soccer, aside from using your hands to fake an injury. you know, we have to throw the ball in. So I guess it gives them an opportunity if it goes out of bounds. I grab a freshly sanitized one, and the one that just went out, that has a better type of clearing. so who knows? Justin: Yeah, it’s, it’s odd. But, you know, I think from our standpoint, right, the biggest thing that we, we want to be super concerned about is we are looking at, you know, as people get ready for this, right? I think in the beginning, everyone kind of thought, all right, We’re definitely going to have a fall season. And then it was sorta like, Oh no, what if we don’t have a fall season? And so now, you know, I think what we want to get on and chat about today is, first of all, I think everyone needs to prepare as if there is going to be a fall season. For a couple of reasons. One, I think, you know, from a competition standpoint and a injury prevention standpoint and all that, it’s really important that everyone’s prepared. also, no one’s doing anything else. So prepare like there’s going to be a fall season. you’ve got nothing to lose. Other than getting into better conditioning. so, you know, that’s the big thing. But also, some people’s access to practice equipment teams, these things are going to be limited. And so thought this would be a good time to chat about that and give some advice on how people can handle that. John: Yeah. I mean, you made a good point that, you know, people need to just act as if, no matter what. I mean for a number of reasons. Worst case scenario, it doesn’t happen. We need to start getting active again. You know, everybody, not just athletes, but people need to, get active and get outdoors a little bit more. thankfully this is occurring year. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that it’s not the dead of winter, for us right now. and so we can get out and be more active. But, you know, the biggest things that we’re seeing, that Ashley and I, you know, because, you know, soccer is one of our passions. you know, working with the fall athletes coming in with a lot of high school and college coaches. you know, statistics show that the most like, tragic and catastrophic injuries happened within the first two weeks of reporting back to mandatory training after a period of inactivity. and I mean, I think every college coach will kind of attest to that. The first couple of weeks in the preseason is when you’re going to have some things kind of pop up and rear their ugly heads, and you’re always gonna have the athletes that are prepared well, and then you’re always going to have the ones that, you know, we’re kind of skirting by. And then there may be a couple stragglers that really didn’t do anything, and they were just, you know, figured that they play catch up. And I think. That’s fine, you know, and we can kind of deal with the normal statistics there if they’ve been playing. But nobody’s been playing for months now. So that’s going to kind of be the followup to the first blog post that I kind of put out an Ashland, add the tag team this and talking with a lot of strength coaches. and you know, actual team coaches to try and figure this out. And the nice thing is the NSCA, the national strength and conditioning association. Has guidelines strictly for this, for re-introducing athletes. So for this a climatization period after a long period of inactivity. And so we’ve been able to put together some formulas and figure out exactly how to put objective criteria into this. How long should the players be playing for week one, week two, week three, week four? How many days off should they be given? What kind of intensity. and there’s something that completely threw me for a loop, but it makes complete sense about the fitness testing. And, I definitely want to get into that later, but I’ll let, kind of actually talk a little bit before I keep Ashley: rambling. I mean, I think one of the big things that we should really take into account is how much time we have right now. And in regards to athletes preparing for sport. We’re all kind of, some of us are sitting around, some athletes are going out. And I think there’s another aspect that we should talk about too. Cause there’s some athletes out there who right now are busting their butt 100%. Every day. And you know, parents are calling and they’re concerned and they’re saying, Hey, you know what? You know, my kid is out there and they are just going gung ho on the field or in my yard. They’re out there for an hour and a half a day, and that’s also something in this time that we need to examine. in regards to preparedness for the fall, because we don’t want athletes to go in over-trained, and over fatigued. So aside from just saying, Hey, you know what? We’re worried about them being prepared. There’s also going to be those people who are out there that are doing just that little bit too much. So looking at it from a little bit of a different spectrum. That’s just, that’s one of the other things that we really have to look at and observe. Going into the fall, we have what probably like, what do we say, 1213 weeks and time to prepare. So we don’t need to be going all out right now. You know, we should be doing a gradual build, and that’s where, you know, all of the statistics and stuff that we’ll talk about. you know, John was talking about this. This period of time where we can kind of draw up and start increasing time. You know, we should use that to our advantage. and you know what? Not everybody knows how to do that, but that’s our goal is to kind of say, Hey, you know what? This is what we think should be going on. how we should be implementing these training plans and what should be a part of these training plans because it shouldn’t just be running. It shouldn’t just be weightlifting. It shouldn’t just be a whole bunch of plyometrics. We have to kind of go through and look at it little by little as to what it should be for athletes to stay healthy. Justin: No good. Yeah. I was, you know, I was gonna say, I think that, you know, you see these, these athletes are losing access a little bit to their coaches. they’re losing access to facilities, right? So a lot of, you know, especially you look at these high school athletes and you look at different fields being closed, different club teams being being off for the spring. and so everybody’s going to be coming into this fall season in a significantly different position than they were before. and probably with different resources at their disposal to work through it. and I think there’s different, you know, we, we could sort
