We are told to keep the end in mind. After all, reverse engineering from the place you want to go to makes sense. So, do you focus on having fewer injuries or do you focus on being robust?
What difference does it make?
Turns out quite a bit because the lens you look through decides what you pay attention to.
Focus on injury prevention, and the chances are you will focus on things that predict and prevent injury. And that’s reasonable because, after all, that’s the thing you want to reduce: injuries. Everything you do after that pushes you further down the road.
Focus on robustness, and you build systems that can tolerate load; in other words, you don’t focus on any one thing, you focus on redundancy and reserves rather than trying to optimise for any one marker of performance—in this case, injury reduction.
Right now, for example, there is an obsession with hamstring injuries.
The ability to withstand or overcome adverse conditions is robustness. The thing that arrives—that you just didn’t see coming—and kicks you in the arse.
Being robust is not to predict or to know, it’s to respond to the challenge and somehow overcome it.