For the longest time coaches and trainers have been teaching athletes that they need to work hard and push themselves in practice so that when it’s time to compete, their performance level is at its highest potential peak.

While I don’t disagree with training to perform, I do disagree with how most instruction is directed to one sport-specific task. The problem I have come to recognize is that more and more kids are becoming sport specific and trying to specialize in one to become the best.

As a result these young athletes are not developing other motions needed for most sports. The concept that I am hinting at is not the performance of the athlete’s body, but the function of the athlete’s body.

All too often I watch a youth sporting event and see some form of athletic brace or support on one of the athletes. While I will not argue that sporting injuries have and will continue to happen, I do believe injuries without contact are becoming more prevalent.

Let me give you an example. Sue is playing in a high school basketball game. She is the best player on the team. She jumps up for a rebound, comes down with the ball, twists her knee and blows out her ligaments. There was no trauma or impact to her from any other player.

Simply put, it was a failure in the function of her body. This is scary because even though she was performing at a high level, she still had a functional breakdown resulting in a knee injury.

Unfortunately, most of us have this idea that if you can perform at a high level of athletics, then you are more resistant to injury. The real problem is that performance is not a predictor of durability for an athlete, movement is (function). The good news is that today there are specially trained people who are able to evaluate function rather than performance.

In years past most coaches and trainers have been concerned with performance tests like how fast you can run, how high you can jump and how much weight you can lift. Function has nothing to do with these measures of performance.

Functional tests are measures of everyday movements such as bending to pick something up from the ground. I’m sure you would agree with me that everyone should be able to do this, especially an athlete.

Unfortunately, most people can but the problem is they are not doing it correctly, which leaves them prone to injury. Injuries increase the rate of degeneration in whatever joints are involved and ultimately come back to be lifelong, nagging pain.

If athletes, regardless of age, have functional flaws with their bodies’ motor patterns, they become increasingly susceptible to injury while practicing or competing.

In the example of Sue playing basketball, her knee was the location of injury but what if it was the weakest link in the chain? When we practice to perform we build incredible muscle strength and power.

When something goes wrong, normally the weakest area or highest point of stress breaks and injury occurs there rather than where the problem actually is. The actual problem that Sue has cannot be found without evaluating her functional abilities, so until that happens she will continue to be prone to injury.

I used basketball as the example but regardless of the type of sport, non-traumatic injuries have become all too common. By briefly evaluating our youths’ function rather than performance I believe injury prevention can be brought to an entirely new level. Ultimately this results in improved performance and life-long health for our youth athletes.

With the Olympics just finishing, I think we can all sit back and admire how amazing each athlete really is. The reason for this is that they are all trained to have almost flawless function first and then learn to perform their sport at a high level.

This is the perfect combination of function and performance that leads to world class athletes and gold medals.

Tony Giralmo is owner of Dynamic Performance Chiropractic in Black Diamond.