A large muscular frame and definition is often sought after by many. You only need visit a gym to see the effort that goes into getting the right look. But when a muscle fails to support a joint and injury occurs the failure is usually not that the muscle wasn’t developed enough but was told to do the wrong thing by the brain. Studies have been done and shown that the average ankle sprain takes 0.08 seconds to occur. In 0.08 seconds your ankle is rotating at 1500 degrees per second. Similar studies have been done on the ACL. An ACL takes about 0.04 seconds to rupture and the ligament stretches about 9mm in this time before it fails. This means that the time for the body to recognise and react is extremely small possibly one or two hundredths of a second. Essentially you could have the “Dwayne the Rock” Johnson’s muscles but if they contract a hundredth of a second too late then it is too late and an injury occurs.

After an injury the picture becomes even more confused. The brain seems to forget where the joints are and gets lazy sending messages to control the joint. This is why you are more likely to have another injury after the first. For this reason training the brain to recognise joint position and to actively participate in joint control is so critical. It also explains why strength training can be quite effective in reducing injury in healthy populations (who have normal brain / motor control because they have not been injured). Strength training on its own is very poor for rehabilitation purposes. Neuromuscular control is the term that medical staffuse for the process of the brain controlling movement of the limbs. Optimal neuromuscular control is gained through training the brain with specific neuromuscular exercises. They must be done and practiced properly. Supervision will be required initially. They are critical to reducing secondary injury after an initial injury and provide promising results for preventing an initial injury from ever recurring.