Joe Burrow's Injured
One of the best young quarterbacks not at Point B at the start of NFL training camp.
It is the first week of NFL training camp, and reactive strength injuries are already accumulating, with one of the injuries affecting one of the NFL’s top young quarterbacks, Joe Burrow.
Reactive strength is a fundamental capacity of Point B, and Burrow's injury is a good example of why it is essential. Due to Joe Burrow's suboptimal connective tissue, he is now unable to perform the necessary retraining repetitions (i.e., practice) that his nervous system needs to play quarterback at the highest level effectively. As a result, he may not be fully prepared for the early weeks of the NFL season.
Understand: Burrow’s connective tissue (I.e., lack of reactive strength) is a limiting constraint on his career.
Understanding Joe Burrow’s Injury
While ESPN, Sports Illustrated, NFL Network, and other news sources are waiting to learn the exact nature of Joe Burrow's injury via MRI, we will provide an explanation to strength practitioners about what happened. As you can see from this video, Burrow was performing a relative reactive strength movement (i.e., bodyweight) dynamically, and it resulted in an injury to his connective tissue or what the media is referring to as a “strain.”
Burrow injured himself while dynamically moving his body weight - meaning: he put a “normal” amount of force through his lower leg. “Normal” meaning: he has put the same amount of force (i.e., magnitude & speed) repetitively through that leg, probably all this first week of training camp, with no injury.
Unfortunately for Burrow and the Bengals, his leg has suboptimal connective tissue architecture. This means that applying normal force into abnormal connective tissue will lead to abnormal force transmission - which is what we saw. The film shows connective tissues that could not optimally absorb, dissipate, and counteract normal force generation during an eccentric to concentric contraction; thus, Burrow’s connective tissues blew up (i.e., failed/yielded).
It is interesting to also see that Burrow has the calve wrapped prior to going out to practice, which is another indicator his connective tissue architecture was in a suboptimal physical state.
It is interesting that one of the most cognitively prepared players reported to camp physically unprepared. This is more than likely due to Burrow not being aware that he should have been appropriately training reactive strength in the off-season and not a lack of effort. This unfortunate scenario highlights the incompleteness of what reactive strength is in exercise science and how to train in regards to training science.
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