The Italian professional soccer league, Serie A, has had a number of significant injuries to its players already this season, and many top sports doctors believe that these injuries could have been at least less serious, if not avoided completely, by less intensive training on the parts of the athletes.
One of the coaches receiving criticism over his team’s training regimen is Inter Milan’s Rafael Benitez. Inter Milan’s team members currently have 15 muscle-related problems among them. However, Benitez says that 40 percent of these injuries occurred while the team was on international duty. Additionally, he said that 85 percent of the injuries are from last year and are not related to this year’s training schedule.
“Certainly a big reason for it is the amount of games being played but you also can’t have training so intense and so often,” said Arsenio Veicsteinas, one of Italy’s most well-respected sports doctors at the University of Milan. “It’s very easy to say don’t train, it’s very difficult to put into practice. Players often also don’t recuperate properly from injuries and then play and this augments the problem.”
Sergio Califano, a doctor from the Medical Institute of Sport in Florence strongly believes that if professional athletes reduced the amount of time they trained they would experience less muscle injuries. However, reducing the amount of training time a team sees gives an advantage to their opponents.
“It’s possible that you get more injuries if you change the intensity of training, it’s a phenomenon that happens. It’s not rare,” said Califano. “This is a problem with all top level sport; if you push it to the maximum then there is a risk. It’s logical that you can’t push muscles past a certain point. But we know not training as much isn’t possible or practical.”
