David Tenney, High Performance Director for Austin FC, experienced Coach in MLS. Talks with us about the huge increase on hamstring injuries in the last 20 years.<\/strong><\/h1>\nHamstring injury rates have increased during recent seasons and now constitute 24% of all injuries in men\u2019s professional football: the UEFA Elite Club Injury Study from 2001\/02 to 2021\/22 (Ekstrand et al 2022)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
TP: What\u2019s your opinion on the following frequent argument? \u201cThere\u2019s more intensity now than 20 years ago\u201d.<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\nDavid Tenney: <\/strong>\u2028I think people think about intensity and they think purely volumes of running at fast speeds, or volumes of work at fast accelerations, or heavier decelerations, it’s purely physical.<\/p>\nThere’s this mistake that everything that is physiological is most important because it’s easiest to measure. And I think there’s a huge mental component piece to intensity. There’s a huge cognitive piece. There’s a huge emotional piece to intensity.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>
![](\"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/Tenney-Action.jpeg\" "\\"Tenney-Action\\"")
<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>I think what you learn in Tactical Periodisation\u00ae<\/a> is that as much as you want to separate physical from the mental and emotional you can’t. It’s funny, I think a lot of us spent a lot of time immersed in Tactical Periodization\u00ae<\/a>, we’ve read a lot from Pep Lijnder’s<\/a> and the book that he had out last year and obviously called \u201cIntensity\u201d! And he has this sentence in there, which was the only sentence that I wrote down and I remember most, because it’s such a challenge to what people think from the sports science world, which is \u201clinear running is the enemy of intensity\u201d!<\/p>\nIt’s so different than what a lot of the assumptions that people make that live in a sports science\u2028world. And the reality is that if I’m just running linearly, there’s no emotional component to it, there’s no cognitive component to it. So it lacks that level of intensity. And that really is an important part of intensity.<\/p>\n
So, as I think that about intensity, typically, researchers are talking about, \u201coh, there’s this many more number of sprints and we’re covering this much more distance and higher velocities, therefore there’s more intensity\u201d<\/em>. But, I think that’s not true from the standpoint of like you really have to look at what’s going on cognitively and emotionally. And cognitively, you may have to make more decisions than you did 20 years ago, but that’s not how I think the sports science research is looking at things.<\/p>\nBecome a <\/span>PT Membership<\/a> and watch the whole <\/span>conference<\/a> of David Tenney.<\/span><\/p>\nKeywords: Football\/Soccer Injuries; Injury Prevention; Intensity; Training.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4902"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6356,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902\/revisions\/6356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
TP: What\u2019s your opinion on the following frequent argument? \u201cThere\u2019s more intensity now than 20 years ago\u201d.<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\nDavid Tenney: <\/strong>\u2028I think people think about intensity and they think purely volumes of running at fast speeds, or volumes of work at fast accelerations, or heavier decelerations, it’s purely physical.<\/p>\nThere’s this mistake that everything that is physiological is most important because it’s easiest to measure. And I think there’s a huge mental component piece to intensity. There’s a huge cognitive piece. There’s a huge emotional piece to intensity.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>I think what you learn in Tactical Periodisation\u00ae<\/a> is that as much as you want to separate physical from the mental and emotional you can’t. It’s funny, I think a lot of us spent a lot of time immersed in Tactical Periodization\u00ae<\/a>, we’ve read a lot from Pep Lijnder’s<\/a> and the book that he had out last year and obviously called \u201cIntensity\u201d! And he has this sentence in there, which was the only sentence that I wrote down and I remember most, because it’s such a challenge to what people think from the sports science world, which is \u201clinear running is the enemy of intensity\u201d!<\/p>\nIt’s so different than what a lot of the assumptions that people make that live in a sports science\u2028world. And the reality is that if I’m just running linearly, there’s no emotional component to it, there’s no cognitive component to it. So it lacks that level of intensity. And that really is an important part of intensity.<\/p>\n
So, as I think that about intensity, typically, researchers are talking about, \u201coh, there’s this many more number of sprints and we’re covering this much more distance and higher velocities, therefore there’s more intensity\u201d<\/em>. But, I think that’s not true from the standpoint of like you really have to look at what’s going on cognitively and emotionally. And cognitively, you may have to make more decisions than you did 20 years ago, but that’s not how I think the sports science research is looking at things.<\/p>\nBecome a <\/span>PT Membership<\/a> and watch the whole <\/span>conference<\/a> of David Tenney.<\/span><\/p>\nKeywords: Football\/Soccer Injuries; Injury Prevention; Intensity; Training.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4902"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6356,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902\/revisions\/6356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
There’s this mistake that everything that is physiological is most important because it’s easiest to measure. And I think there’s a huge mental component piece to intensity. There’s a huge cognitive piece. There’s a huge emotional piece to intensity.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>
<\/span><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>I think what you learn in Tactical Periodisation\u00ae<\/a> is that as much as you want to separate physical from the mental and emotional you can’t. It’s funny, I think a lot of us spent a lot of time immersed in Tactical Periodization\u00ae<\/a>, we’ve read a lot from Pep Lijnder’s<\/a> and the book that he had out last year and obviously called \u201cIntensity\u201d! And he has this sentence in there, which was the only sentence that I wrote down and I remember most, because it’s such a challenge to what people think from the sports science world, which is \u201clinear running is the enemy of intensity\u201d!<\/p>\n It’s so different than what a lot of the assumptions that people make that live in a sports science\u2028world. And the reality is that if I’m just running linearly, there’s no emotional component to it, there’s no cognitive component to it. So it lacks that level of intensity. And that really is an important part of intensity.<\/p>\n So, as I think that about intensity, typically, researchers are talking about, \u201coh, there’s this many more number of sprints and we’re covering this much more distance and higher velocities, therefore there’s more intensity\u201d<\/em>. But, I think that’s not true from the standpoint of like you really have to look at what’s going on cognitively and emotionally. And cognitively, you may have to make more decisions than you did 20 years ago, but that’s not how I think the sports science research is looking at things.<\/p>\n Become a <\/span>PT Membership<\/a> and watch the whole <\/span>conference<\/a> of David Tenney.<\/span><\/p>\n Keywords: Football\/Soccer Injuries; Injury Prevention; Intensity; Training.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4902"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6356,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4902\/revisions\/6356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tacticalperiodisation.com\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}