This idea is not new that too much training leads to injury and that a balance of gradual increase in training load helps the athlete train more without getting injured.
I remember my cross country coach at UC Davis, Bill Adams
(a PhD in Exercise Physiology) teaching us this same thing and I remember reading these same concepts in Runner's World magazine back in the 1970s.
We don't really need to give it a new name, "The Training-Injury Prevention Paradox", since 1) this is not new knowledge and 2) this all makes complete sense once one understands the mechanics of injury production and the physiology of tissue changes that occur with exercise, information which has been known for the past four decades.
In my opinion, it's just giving another name to previously known concepts...kind of like calling racing flats "minimalist shoes" and then claiming you invented something new.:cool:
Nothing new really, the closer you come to the line where injury occurs the greater the training effect.
Also links to the research showing that athletes that have regular rest days and sleep more than 8 hours a night tend to be less injured and have better performances
To a point re the value of the good Coach, the biggest step forward Is communication, The old days programs were set in stone, you just did what you were told, now the individual has input, ie feeling really low or really tired, the coach listens and changes the training
But if you look at sport it is interesting how things have gone
The Russian model of pushing until they break and what you have left is super human
The Russian model plus doping Push them harder, help them recover with chemicals, make them stronger with chemicals
The doping model plus science late 70?s early 80?s until around 2007
Now we have a modified Science and Doping model dominating sport
Whilst on the surface perhaps not a new concept regarding relationships between training/load and injury this paper is well worth a read.
It discusses how an individuals injury risk increases significantly if their acute [last 1/52] to chronic [weekly average over last 4/52] workload ratio increases above 1.5.
I can't remember reading about such a ratio previously? So perhaps not just renaming old concepts?
The problem with the paper isn't the workload ratio they used.
The authors could have chosen a different ratio and found the same results.
Every coach has their own pet ratio of how to increase the training load of their athletes and the really good coaches don't just use one training ratio for each athlete since all athletes are different.
The problem with the paper is that they made the assumption that it is a widespread belief that an increase in training always leads to injury and that it has never been suggested before that if one simply gradually increases the training load, over time, that injury can not only be prevented but also that higher training loads can then be done by the athlete with less injury risk.
They wrongly used the word "paradox" in the title of their paper, which, to me, makes me think that the authors were trying to make their research seem more ground-breaking than it really is.
Let's look at the definition of the word "paradox".
Would you have thought, that before this paper was published, that the following idea sounded self-contradictory or absurd?:
A more gradual increase in training load, over time, allows an athlete to train at higher loads with reduced injury risk, over time.
No, it is not a paradox, that a gradual increase in training load, over time, reduces injury risk and allows higher training loads.
This idea that a gradual increase in training load, over time, reduces injury risk and allows higher training loads has been common knowledge among coaches, exercise physiologists, and sports physicians for decades, and should, in my opinion, not be considered a
paradox.
It would be like some authors writing a paper in 2016 that experimentally showed that sugar can be consumed for fuel by a runner to help them run, but that if the runner eats too much sugar and sits around and doesn't train, then that can make the runner fatter, and then the authors calling their "newly-found idea" the:
Sugar Eating Paradox.
Is this "Sugar Eating Paradox" really a paradox?
No.
It has been common knowledge among nutritionists and physicians for decades that caloric intake is useful for the production of metabolic energy but also, in excess, can produce adipose tissue.
In other words, the "Sugar Eating Paradox" is not a paradox, no matter how much the authors want to believe that it is.
Here is a paper from over 35 years ago that recognizes the concept that training too much, too soon can lead to injury (Corrigan B:
Musculoskeletal complications of Jogging. Brit.J.Sports Med.: 1980, 14, 37-38 ).
Editrial: High training workloads alone do not cause sports injuries: how you get there is the real issue
Tim J Gabbett, Billy T Hulin, Peter Blanch, Rod Whiteley Br J Sports Med doi:10.1136/bjsports-2015-095567