Close your eyes, you're not going to want to see this...

With the start of baseball season, we are bound to see the rate of injuries go up. Yes, things happen and accidents occur. But many of these accidents do not have to happen. Many of them can be avoided if we only trained the muscles and reactive systems required to prevent many of them. It almost seems too easy.

Lets start from the ground up: the ankles.

Baseball along with many other sports is played on two feet. It also involves running. For the most part, the players are running on a flat surface. But it never fails you will see an athlete round the bases and sprain an ankle. Why does this occur? I mean he's done it thousands of times before, right?

We have no problem standing flat on our feet. But when we get a little sideways and we are standing on the outside of our feet, our ankle wants to keep on rolling. That is inertia - an object will maintain its path of travel until acted upon by an outside force.

If we can get the nervous system to recognize that our ankle is about to roll and quickly react and fix it, then we can prevent it from rolling. Some of you may have had this happen; you're running and the ankle starts to roll but you catch it and although it scared you, thinking you're about to sprain your ankle, but you caught it and it was nothing more than a scare.

To train this reactive ability, we need to train in what we call a proprioceptively enriched environment. Or simply a stability/balance challenged environment. At Pair & Marotta, we do this by having you stand on a single leg, or closing your eyes or placing you on an unstable surface such as an air disc, half a foam roll, or a airex pad.

This trains the muscles of your ankle to quickly recognize a potentially dangerous situation and react as opposed to having to think about it. The most convenient and beneficial time to work on balance and stability is during warm-ups. Balance on a single leg and reach in different directions, skip in different directions, shuffle and then change direction, run in different directions. These are all good things that will help prevent injury!!

You will see many of these types of exercises in "Peak Preparation: A On-Field Guide to Performance."