Liz Robson, Head of Performance Physiotherapy
Lead for Sport Performance & Athlete Development
Earlier this month I attended the International Conference on Injury and Illness Prevention in Sport, at the University of Bath. It’s a two-day conference bringing together clinicians, researchers, sports scientists and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest developments in sports injury and illness prevention, athlete health and performance.
It made for a memorable couple of days. Hundreds of delegates, so many excellent presentations and parallel sessions running at once that I felt like I needed to duplicate myself (sadly still working on that one), networking events, and dinner in an Ancient Roman bath. Add in enough coffee to keep the city of Bath awake for a week and you have a top notch conference, and a fairly excitable physiotherapist by day two.
I naturally gravitated towards sessions on adolescent athlete health, female athlete research and injury prevention, but one theme ran through almost every presentation I sat in on:
Research is only useful if it changes what happens in the real world.
Why This Conference Matters
Sports medicine is moving quickly. We have more data, more technology and more research than ever before, yet many of the core challenges remain the same. How do we keep athletes healthy? How do we reduce injuries? How do we support performance without compromising wellbeing?
Perhaps most importantly, how do we take good research and make it useful for athletes, coaches, schools and clinicians at the grass roots level as well as professional/elite level? That question sat with me throughout the conference and led to some of the most interesting discussions over the couple of days.
Meliora’s Place in the Conversation
One of the reassuring things about attending conferences like this is realising that many of the challenges being discussed internationally are the same ones we encounter every day at Meliora. Growth and maturation, female athlete health, concussion, injury prevention, balancing sporting ambitions with the realities of school life. Many of the conversations felt very familiar and it reinforced something we strongly believe in.
Athletes should never be viewed simply as an injury, a scan result or a performance metric.
Our athletes are young people navigating a period of rapid growth, development and change, and supporting them means recognising that they are people first, not just athletes.
Understanding that wider picture is often where the biggest opportunities to improve health and performance lie.
One line from the conference has stuck with me since, from Roald Bahr’s keynote:
To help prevent judgement errors, don’t become your athlete’s biggest fan.
Bahr, Senior Advisor to the IOC Medical and Scientific Department, was speaking from decades of experience watching clinicians and coaches grow close to the athletes they support. The closer that relationship gets, the harder it can become to read a niggle objectively, push back on a return-to-play decision, or have the difficult conversation an athlete doesn’t want to hear.
Whilst I agree with what Roald is saying, I’d add a footnote. Some of the best clinical reads come precisely from that closeness, not despite it, particularly with adolescent athletes. An athlete who trusts you will tell you about the shoulder twinge they’d hide from someone more clinically detached. The skill probably isn’t choosing distance over investment, but holding both:
Being genuinely on their side while keeping a separate channel open for the conversations they don’t want to have.
The Big Takeaways: A few themes stood out.
Injury prevention is becoming more individualised. The days of one-size-fits-all solutions are disappearing. Training load, sleep, recovery, growth, previous injury and the athlete’s environment all matter. One statistic from the Olympic data shared at the conference has stayed with me:
The majority of injuries during an Olympic career occurred during training rather than competition, and a quarter of Olympians reported training while injured.
It’s a reminder that prevention has to live in the everyday, not just on competition day and this is never truer than when working with adolescents.
Female athlete research continues to gather momentum. There is still much to learn, but the quality of research and the depth of discussion in this area continue to improve, and that’s good news for athletes, clinicians and coaches alike. One session looked at menstrual cycle health in high-performance sport, referencing the UEFA consensus statement on implementing menstrual cycle tracking.
A point that came through clearly was that while tracking has real value, the evidence base isn’t yet strong enough to support phase-based training or competition adjustments built around it.
Not everything can, or should, be attributed to where an athlete is in her cycle, and being honest about that gap is part of doing right by female athletes, not a setback to it.
Growth and maturation remain hugely important, particularly for those of us working with young athletes. As one speaker put it,
The question is not how old the athlete is, but where they are on their development journey.
Two athletes of the same age can be in very different stages of development, and understanding that can change how we approach training, performance and rehabilitation.
There was also some genuinely new thinking on apophyseal injuries presented that’s worth setting out properly. The traditional model has always been fairly linear:
- Growth spurt leads to apophyseal injury, which resolves as the athlete matures. Job done.
The current thinking adds several steps that change the picture considerably:
- Growth spurt leads to apophyseal injury, which leads to tendon and soft tissue adaptations, which lead to altered biomechanics, which leave the athlete carrying future injury risk long after the original injury has settled down.
That reframe matters because it shifts the questions we should be asking. It’s no longer enough to ask whether the apophyseal injury itself has resolved. We need to be asking what’s happened to the tendon and surrounding soft tissue since, and how that’s playing out biomechanically as the athlete moves further past their peak height velocity.
Location of the apophyseal injury can also offer real clues as to where an athlete sits on their maturation journey, which has implications for how we monitor and manage them afterwards.
Implementation matters. Some of the most impressive work presented wasn’t necessarily the newest research. It was seeing how organisations are successfully translating evidence into large-scale, real-world programmes that actually reach athletes. As one speaker summed it up,
The programme is not the intervention. The environment is the intervention.
What This Means for Athletes, Parents, Schools and Clinicians
The message was surprisingly simple. Health and performance are not competing priorities. The healthiest athletes are often the ones best positioned to perform well and stay involved in sport long term.
For parents and schools, that means recognising that sleep, recovery, nutrition, wellbeing and communication matter just as much as training. For clinicians, it means continuing to look beyond the injury itself and understanding the wider context in which athletes live, learn and compete.
How We Are Applying These Learnings
The encouraging thing is that UKCCIIS didn’t send me home with a list of things we need to completely rethink. Instead, it reinforced much of the work already taking place across Meliora.
We’ll continue developing our work around growth and maturation monitoring, female athlete health, concussion management, injury prevention and performance-informed rehabilitation, while making sure the latest research is translated into practical support for athletes, families and schools.
Looking Ahead
The biggest takeaway from UKCCIIS wasn’t a single study or headline. It was the growing recognition that athletes are complex, and that there are very few simple answers.
The future of sports medicine isn’t simply better rehabilitation. It is earlier identification, better prevention, more personalised care and closer collaboration between researchers, clinicians, coaches, schools and athletes. Ultimately, it lies in understanding the individual, working collaboratively and applying evidence in ways that genuinely make a difference.
My notebook is full (and largely still legible, which feels like a win), my brain is still firing on all cylinders, and I’ve come back with some valuable new connections and collaborations I’m excited to develop in the months ahead. Alongside plenty of ideas about how we can continue improving the care we provide to the athletes, families and schools we support, it leaves me feeling optimistic that the future of sports medicine, and the opportunities to better support athletes, looks very bright.
Now comes the important part: turning those ideas into action.