Less training the source of recent NFL injuries?

"Nick Hardwick is a thinker who’s thankful he still can assimilate, and so he’s capable of some great thoughts as to why NFL players are dropping like so much fall foliage.

Still, we can’t know for sure, not even the king’s horses and king’s men."

...

"The Chargers may have set injury records — really, 12 players coming off the field in Baltimore, eight not returning? — but they are not alone in sick bay. There’s a league-wide epidemic. Pandemic. It’s widespread, OK?"

...

"There isn’t enough training for a brutal game,” Hardwick says. “Everyone’s going somewhere else to get the proper training — or they’re not getting it at all. And we used to get all we wanted to get ready for combat...

...In hindsight, a lot of player reps were vets who didn’t need 14 weeks of (offseason) work. But it hasn’t helped the younger players. Back then, we worked on our bodies."

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/new ... -injuries/

I firmly believe it's the result of over training. In the sense that the human body does have a reasonable limit of performance. A two hundred twenty five pound back who is squatting 600 pound regularly is taking his tendons and joints to the limit, especially when coupled with cutting and juking against huge defenders.

But the catch 22 is that without all this muscle building, you can't reasonably compete with the bigger stronger ones....

But I've played all three major sports my entire life, 35 years old now, mvp of high school baseball, football, and basketball teams, without ever suffering a major injury. I also am tall and skinny and never got over 185 pounds, and have done significantly less weight training than most of my peers. It hurt me in the sense of being able to compete at the next level, but kept me on the field for every single game. Still play intramural all three in the navy. No injuries at all.

Conditioning, training, technique and learning how to escape are part of it, but in the NFL things happen so fast, you sometimes need some luck to stay healthy. Teams are incorporating more mind and flexible training like yoga into their routine, which normally makes hits a lot more bend but not break kind of thing. NFL is a contact sport, so I expect anyone who is not conditioned to play the sport, will be more prone to injuries than the rest. I think the Seahawks have done a fine job on conditioning after reading stories about athletes doing yoga, eating healthy, some other martial arts to learn techniques on dealing with full impact blows.