Forty years ago, very few physical therapy clinics existed.

Sports performance training was basically the football team lifting in the gym.

Athletes today have so much more opportunity to improve than we had a generation ago.

And it could be the exact reason why more athletes are getting injured than ever before.

Danny Foley, owner of RudeRock Performance in San Diego and trainer of many pro athletes, recently said the following:

"Across sport, we are doing a better job than ever of improving physical capacity, technical skill, speed, strength, power and performance outputs.

Athletes are performing at levels we have truly never seen before. But, at the same time, we are also facing an ongoing injury crisis.

Across most sports, injury rates have continued to rise over the last two to three decades.

We are building better athletes, but we are not always managing the consequences of that development with the same level of precision.

Virtually every athlete, at all levels and in all sports, is currently managing something. In many environments, those things get ignored, pushed through, or treated as minor inconveniences until they are not minor any more.

Over time, small issues can become legitimate injuries, and legitimate injuries can become repeated patterns."

We aren't going back to a slower, weaker version of sport,

What we must do, moving forward, is adapt to this new reality.

And do a better job of snuffing out injury risks before they blow up into something bigger.

Youth athletes, and their coaches, should take chronic pain seriously, managing workload when present.

Training programs like ours must do a better job of detecting risks, and use effective strategies to eliminate them.

Any athlete who has worked with us knows we use a Functional Movement Screen to detect underlying risks.

Although our detection system has remained constant, the exercises and strategies we then use to fix problem areas has changed dramatically over the years.

Thanks to Danny Foley, and his company RudeRock, we are again updating our methods to provide better injury management and prevention strategies.

An increased emphasis on key areas to mobilize, like the hip flexors and big toe.

More barefoot training for speed athletes.

Plus some other little tweaks to help our kids avoid a future injury.

Today's college and pro athletes are the first wave which grew up when sports performance training became widely used.

They jump higher, run faster, throw and shoot harder than athletes in any previous era.

But they've also experienced a dramatic rise in ACL tears, Achilles ruptures, and elbow surgeries.

Today's youth athletes represent the second wave, one which hopefully will see the same performance improvements, but fewer injuries.

The time to make that happen is now.