Tim Lincecum, Don't cry for me Giants!




As I predicted in 2011, Mr. Lincecum's lower back injury was just matter of time. http://fantasynews.cbssports.com/fantasybaseball/update/24763989/giants-pitcher-tim-lincecum-leaves-due-to-injury. Using a simple mechanical analysis of online pictures and videos, I was able to accurately predict the negative outcome of his methods  http://danielkamenetzky.blogspot.com/2011/05/tim-lincecum-risk-of-injuries.html, but what I find most baffling is that his present injury comes as such a surprise to the athletic community: We now have the information and tools necessary to identify risk of damage long before the load starts to erode the structure, and to understand the role movement plays in stressing the biological structures. Because we can now predict both positive and negative outcomes, how is possible that a professional player at the level of Mr. Lincecum does not engage in a constant process of evaluation, analysis and follow up? An institution like the Giants should long ago have implemented those practices as part of the regular training process and athlete care! It is cheap, easy to implement and indispensable.

Imagine what we can achieve if starting early on in the career of every athlete, we evaluate and analyze all aspects of their performance, using proper protocols and methodologies. But instead, we continue to see how trainers and other professionals, many with years of education and experience in the fields of health, fitness and medicine, depend on magical thinking, belief, and subjective information for their training methods. They use subjective terms like "luck", "talent", "genetics", "innate", "chronic" to explain performance. They seem not to understand that training is a science, and that to produce extreme sustained performance while reducing the risk of injury, the training strategy must be rational, and follow biological rules and laws, starting from the very earliest stages of the athlete's developmental process. Finally, they still do not see that as sports professionals charged with the responsibility of helping athletes to perform, and of solving/preventing injury, they need to know those rules and be able to use them in a rational manner.

We need better educated coaches and parents, and better programs, specifically geared toward sports, in the training of professionals in the medical and therapeutic fields.

Back when I made my original predictions, coaches of young athletes everywhere were training their players to throw like Lincecum, convinced that therein lay their best hope of success. I can only hope that not too many young players were damaged as a result of that non-rational practice. The epidemiology of both young and mature athletes is on the rise, and not only is our profession distracted with non-rational solutions, we are far away from changing this trend (as I urged in 2011 http://danielkamenetzky.blogspot.com/2011/05/tim-lincecum-lets-stop-trend.html)! As a consequence of non-rational training practices in the health care profession, we will be seeing more Tim Lincecums in our future.


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