Fresh Is Not Prepared: Preparation Is Down and Injuries Are Up
“I don’t see where the fact that less is going to be better.”
- Mike McCarthy (2011)
For nearly fifteen years, the NFL has pursued player safety partly by reducing the amount of football players are allowed or required to do. Offseason programs have been shortened, organized team activities have been reduced, contact has been limited, padded practices have been restricted, and the preseason has gone from four games to three. During that same period, sports science has become a major part of professional football. GPS systems track workloads, force plates measure performance, recovery is monitored, and organizations have more information about their players than we could have imagined when I entered the profession.
The purpose behind those changes is understandable. Nobody should advocate returning to the days when coaches believed more was automatically better, water breaks were treated as weakness, and wearing your players out was the sign of good coaching. We learned from those mistakes, and professional football should continue using everything we have learned about training, recovery, equipment, and injury prevention. The question is whether we have moved so far in the other direction that we have made a giant leap into the common-sense mistake that less preparation is safer preparation.
I spent 35 years professionally preparing athletes at the high school, junior college, Division I and NFL levels. The athletes became bigger, faster, and more talented as I moved through those levels, but my base perspective never changed. Determine what someone will eventually be required to do, and then you progressively prepare that person to do it. Sometimes that meant I needed to reduce the work I was planning to do. Sometimes it meant increasing it. The goal was not to produce the freshest athlete possible. The goal was to produce an athlete physically, technically, and mentally capable of handling the demands that are coming. No monitor or satellite had my background or my perspective on what would be needed and what I was asking the player to do.
That is why I believe the NFL needs to take a harder look at the system it has created. The league and its players have spent almost fifteen years reducing the most vital portions of football preparation while the competitive demands of the game have remained and, in one major respect, increased when they added a 17th regular-season game. The question is not whether football should return to the way it was practiced thirty years ago. The question is whether the current system provides enough of the “right” preparation to make players healthier and more resilient so they are able to handle the rigors of an NFL season.
What Changed in 2011
The 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement dramatically changed NFL preparation. The offseason program was reduced by five weeks; organized team activities went from 14 to 10; on-field practice time and contact were limited; full-contact practices in the preseason and regular season were restricted; and additional days off were added. The NFL placed those changes directly under the heading of “Player Health and Safety,” making the intended purpose clear. (NFL.com, “NFL Clubs Approve Comprehensive Agreement,” 2011)
The changes were not “small” adjustments around the edges of the calendar. They removed a huge amount of time coaches previously had to install systems, teach technique, develop younger players, and properly set up a progressive training system to prepare athletes for training camp. The 2020 CBA continued to limit padded work while eventually allowing the league to expand the regular season to 17 games, and the preseason was reduced from four to three games. The NFL therefore moved toward less formal preparation, while asking players to participate in more regular-season games. How does this make any sense? Especially when all we hear about is “athlete safety”?
Sure, there are some legitimate reasons behind many of those decisions. NFL careers are short, players experience enormous physical stress, and there were coaches who abused the amount of access they had to players. The NFLPA had every right to negotiate limits on how long teams controlled players during the offseason and how much unnecessary contact could occur during practices. The problem begins when an improvement in working conditions is treated as proof of improved preparation.
Mike McCarthy was questioning that assumption before the 2011 agreement was completed. He argued that younger, inexperienced players sometimes put their bodies in vulnerable positions precisely because they do not yet know how to perform correctly. From his perspective, a lack of preparation could itself create risk, leading him to question the belief that simply doing less would necessarily result in fewer injuries. (NFL.com, “McCarthy: Fewer Offseason Workouts Won’t Reduce Injuries,” March 30, 2011)
That argument is worth looking back into, because McCarthy was not simply defending a coach’s desire for more practice. He was making a connection between preparation and safety. A player who understands the technique, recognizes the movement in front of him, knows where his body should be positioned and has physically rehearsed the skill is different from a player encountering the same situation for the first time at NFL speed.
The Players Helped Build the Current System
It would be wrong to place all the blame on the owners, assuming these changes were imposed on players. The NFLPA was just as complicit. Through the NFLPA, players actively negotiated many of the reductions in offseason requirements, meeting time and practice exposure. Those changes were focused on the increased control over their bodies and careers, and that is a legitimate labor objective.
Former NFLPA president JC Tretter explained the point of view in 2021. He argued that players train year-round whether they are at the team facility or not and defended their ability to control more of their offseason preparation. He also described player-led offseason changes involving fewer practices, reduced intensity, more walkthrough periods and fewer 11-on-11 repetitions. (NFLPA, “Understanding the Player Perspective,” 2021)
The problem is that what benefits an established veteran with these rule changes might not benefit a developing player in exactly the same way. The NFLPA itself acknowledged that conflict during its Super Bowl 50 press conference in 2016. Executive Committee member Zak DeOssie said younger players could benefit from more time at the facility, more experience with coaches, more time to learn, and more opportunities to become better football players. He then explained that less time on the field and in meeting rooms was important to older players and their career goals. (NFLPA, Super Bowl 50 Press Conference, 2016)
That is an important point in this argument because an eight-year starter and an undrafted rookie do not have the same preparation needs. The veteran may have accumulated thousands of NFL practice and game repetitions. He understands the speed of the game, has developed his technique, and knows how his body responds to a professional season. There were many times during my NFL career when removing unnecessary work from a veteran was exactly the right decision.
The young player is different. He does not have that bank of experience. He needs repetitions, proper coaching from his position coaches to learn how his technique holds up against an NFL athlete instead of someone he faced in college. He needs opportunities to make mistakes that don’t occur in game-time situations, where a technique error might cost a team a vital player.
There is another difference that cannot be ignored. Established professional athletes have the financial resources to supplement what their organizations provide. LeBron James has been widely reported to invest approximately $1.5 million every year in maintaining his body through personal training, nutrition, recovery and specialized equipment. Patrick Mahomes has his own extensive preparation system that includes his longtime personal performance coach, individualized nutrition, a personal chef and recovery technology.
Now compare that with the player trying to establish himself in the NFL. The rookie minimum salary in 2026 is $885,000 for the season. A young player on the practice squad earns $13,750 per week, or $247,500 if he remains there for the entire 18-week regular season. Those are certainly good salaries, but they are nowhere near the financial resources available to established superstars, particularly after taxes, agent fees, rent, essentials, and the expenses associated with starting a professional career.
That creates another problem with assuming players can simply prepare on their own. The athletes with the greatest financial ability to replace what has been removed from the team facility are generally the same athletes who already possess the greatest bank of professional experience. The players who most need the coaching, repetitions, and physical development provided by the organization are also the players least capable of recreating that infrastructure on their own.
A system that reduces preparation equally for everyone may therefore produce unequal consequences. The veteran gains recovery from work he may no longer need and has the resources to supplement whatever preparation he still requires. The developing player loses work that may be essential to becoming the veteran everyone eventually wants to protect.
Fresh Is Not the Same as Prepared
One of my concerns about the direction of modern performance training is the tendency to think of the human body as a gas tank. If we use less fuel during the week, the assumption is that more will remain available on Sunday. That sounds logical until we remember that the human body does not simply expend energy. It also adapts to stress. Less is truly not more when we are preparing for the game of football.
Muscles adapt to appropriate loading. Tendons and connective tissues adapt. The nervous system becomes more efficient. Athletes improve their ability to accelerate, stop, change direction, and produce force through repeated exposure to those demands. Football players develop football capacity by progressively preparing for the forces and movements that the game calls for.
John Harbaugh talks about this point in 2018, saying that young players entering the Ravens were not as “callused up” as players had been previously. He explained that there is a particular type of football fitness involving the muscles, joints, tendons, and ligaments becoming accustomed to football work, and he connected that adaptation directly to practicing football. (ESPN, “John Harbaugh: Rookies Aren’t as ‘Callused Up as They Used to Be,’” 2018)
I do not take “callusing” as an argument for returning to abusive practices or unnecessary collisions. The goal is not to beat athletes up during a training cycle so they can prove how tough they are. Callusing means progressively building the physical and technical ability to handle stresses that cannot be removed once competition begins.
If a receiver has not sprinted, I do not protect his hamstrings by preventing him from sprinting until opening day. I progressively prepare him to sprint. If an offensive lineman will have another 300-pound man attempting to move him against his will, he has to develop the ability to produce and absorb those forces. If a defensive player is going to tackle, he needs technical and physical preparation to put his body into the correct position when the collision occurs.
The game does not adjust to the amount of preparation the player received. The defensive end does not rush at 80 percent because the tackle has had limited live repetitions, and the linebacker does not reduce his speed because the running back has participated in fewer padded practices. The NFL and NFLPA can negotiate the amount of preparation players receive, but they cannot negotiate away the demands waiting for those players on Sunday.
As this system was being implemented while I was in the NFL, our coaches used “IMAGINE the contact” after being told by someone looking at a computer in their office that the previous practice was too hard and needed to be throttled down. IMAGINE? The person making the call had never played or coached the game. That person didn’t watch practice. They said they didn’t have to; the GPS numbers told them what they needed to see.
What if we remove the football from practices? And the team was supposed to IMAGINE the ball in play? That sounds silly. But so does imagining contact in the trenches. Football is a game of contact. You cannot imagine the forces that will develop during the techniques used at that time of contact.
Reducing Exposure and Reducing Risk Are Different Questions
This difference becomes important when we discuss safety. If a team eliminates a contact period from practice, it has unquestionably eliminated the possibility of a player being injured during that particular contact period. That means less exposure. What it has not automatically established is whether cutting out that exposure increased or decreased the player's ability to tolerate the unavoidable contact he will experience later.
That distinction matters because, after years of reducing football preparation, we should be able to see the results. If less practice, less contact, and fewer preseason repetitions are making players safer, the injury data should eventually show that players entering and moving through the regular season are better able to remain healthy.
There is evidence that raises legitimate questions about whether that has happened.
The 2020 season provided an unusual example because COVID-19 eliminated the entire preseason and dramatically disrupted the normal preparation process. One study comparing musculoskeletal injuries in the 2019 and 2020 regular seasons found that injuries increased from 632 in 2019 to 765 in 2020, a statistically significant increase. Calf and Achilles strains increased from 17 to 39, groin injuries from 25 to 46, and ACL tears from 14 to 29. The researchers concluded that the findings suggested organized team preseason training and conditioning could play a role in preventing regular-season injuries. (Orthopedic Journal of Sports Medicine, "Regular-Season Injury Rates in the National Football League After an Attenuated Preseason Due to COVID-19," 2022)
Another study examining specific soft-tissue injuries found a similar pattern. Compared with the average of the 2017 through 2019 seasons, Achilles tendon injuries increased from 20 to 27 in 2020 and hamstring tendon injuries increased from 149 to 186. Both increases were statistically significant. The number of ACL injuries did not significantly change, but their timing did. In the previous three seasons, more than half of the ACL injuries occurred during the preseason. With no preseason games in 2020, the greatest concentration occurred during the first four regular-season games. (Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, "Effect of COVID-19 on Injury Rates and Timing in the National Football League," 2022)
The 2020 season was obviously an extreme circumstance, and it wouldn’t be right to use one COVID-affected season as proof that less preparation causes more injuries. But the following season provides another reason to continue asking the question.
Researchers examining NFL injury reports found that in 2021, injuries resulting in a player being listed out or placed on injured reserve occurred at a rate of 28.70 injuries per 1,000 player exposures. During the 2018 and 2019 seasons, the rate had been 23.09. That is close to a 24 percent increase, and the difference was statistically telling. Lower-extremity injuries increased from 15.31 to 18.84 per 1,000 exposures, while spine/core and head injuries also increased significantly. (Arthroscopy, Sports Medicine, and Rehabilitation, "Injury Rates Remained Elevated in the Second National Football League Season After the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic," 2023)
I found even more interesting is when those injuries occurred. During the first four weeks of the 2021 season, researchers found no significant difference from the 2018 and 2019 seasons. Beginning in Week 5, however, the overall injury incidence increased from 22.10 injuries per 1,000 player exposures in 2018-2019 to 28.92 in 2021, an increase of approximately 31 percent. Lower-extremity injuries increased from 14.49 to 18.75 per 1,000 exposures during that same portion of the season.
That is important to my point because the argument for reducing preparation has often centered on protecting players from unnecessary physical stress. Yet these numbers do not show a group of athletes who were simply being protected by doing less football. They show a huge jump in injuries in 2021 compared with a few seasons earlier, with the difference getting bigger after several weeks into the season.
Availability Changes More Than One Position
This trend is like a rock being thrown into a pool of water. There are repercussions more than the rock just getting wet. It’s the ripples that we must start to look at. When a starter is injured, the injury does not end with one name appearing on the injury report. The ability of the player behind him to perform becomes part of the equation, and that is where reduced developmental preparation can begin affecting the rest of the team.
Football has always used the phrase “next man up,” but saying it does not prepare the next man. A backup is usually a backup for a reason. He may be younger, less experienced, or less talented than the starter. If that player has also received fewer offseason repetitions, fewer padded practices and fewer preseason opportunities to develop than players received in previous eras, the gap between starter and replacement may become even more important.
Consider an offensive tackle. The starter goes down, and the backup enters. If the replacement loses a technical battle because his footwork, recognition or timing have not developed sufficiently, the consequence can immediately move beyond his position. The quarterback gets pressured or hit. A tight end stays in protection instead of entering the route. The quarterback has to release the ball sooner. The coordinator changes what he is willing to call because one matchup has become less reliable.
That is a preparation cascade. One injury creates another demand, and the preparation of the replacement determines how effectively the rest of the team can absorb it.
McCarthy returned to this issue in 2016 after five seasons under the new CBA. He pointed specifically to a younger NFL, five fewer weeks with players, and concerns about preparation and offensive-line play. His argument was that education, awareness, instincts and technical development are connected to sustainable performance. (NFL.com, “Mike McCarthy Says 2011 CBA Is Cause of Increase in Injuries,” 2016)
I saw the same developmental requirement throughout my career. Young players needed repetitions. They needed opportunities against better players, coaching corrections, and another opportunity to execute the skill correctly. They needed to learn what professional speed felt like before they were thrown to the alligators in a real-life game.
You cannot replace those repetitions with a meeting, a computer model, or a walkthrough. All of those tools can help prepare the player, but at some point, the player has to physically do the job.
Where Sports Science Fits
Sports science expanded dramatically during the same period that formal football preparation was being reduced. I experienced that transition firsthand in the NFL, and I want to make an important distinction. I am not opposed to technology. GPS can provide valuable information. Force plates can identify changes we may not see with our eyes. Objective measurements can challenge what a coach thinks he is seeing and force him to take a closer look.
My concern was never that we were collecting information. My concern was what information we were using to determine what those numbers meant.
When GPS and workload monitoring began to gain influence in American football, there was not, and still is not, a massive, widespread bank of NFL-specific data available to establish exactly how much high-speed running, acceleration, deceleration, or total workload an NFL player at a particular position should tolerate. Teams protected their information and did not simply dump years of player data into a common database everyone could study. We were trying to establish standards while we were still accumulating the information necessary to determine what those standards should be.
In my experience, some of the information and concepts being applied to American football came from sports such as European soccer, rugby, and Australian rules football because those sports had been using GPS and player-tracking technology longer than we had. There was information available, but availability does not automatically make information applicable.
The physical demands of those sports are not the same as the physical demands of American football. The body types are different. The work-to-rest patterns are different. The frequency and type of collisions are different. The explosive acceleration and cutting demands are different. Most importantly to this discussion, the physical preparation necessary for an NFL player to become callused to the forces he will endure at his position is way different.
A soccer player covering enormous distances during a match can provide useful information about human performance. A rugby player absorbing repeated collisions can provide useful information about contact. An Australian rules football player can provide useful information about high-speed running and repeated effort. But none of them is a 315-pound NFL offensive guard exploding out of a three-point stance and colliding with another 300-pound man six seconds at a time, or a defensive back accelerating, stopping, changing direction and then striking a 225-pound running back moving in the opposite direction.
They weren’t comparing Granny Smith apples and Honeycrisp apples.
We were comparing an apple to a double cheeseburger. They are all editable (they are all sports), but that’s where the similarity ended.
That does not make the information from those other sports worthless. It means we had to be extremely careful about the confidence we placed in conclusions drawn from it. A number can be measured with tremendous precision and still be interpreted incorrectly if the comparison underneath it is wrong.
And simply collecting NFL data for another decade does not completely solve the problem.
Unlike some international sports, NFL teams do not pool all of their proprietary workload data into a single league-wide database that allows every organization to draw conclusions from thousands of comparable athletes. Teams protect their information. An individual organization is therefore largely building its standards from its own players, its own practices, and its own relatively small population.
There is another problem.
The population never stays the same.
Consider a single position group in soccer and American football. Research involving elite European soccer players has found a relatively similar physical population among top-level outfield players. There are certainly positional and individual differences, but the physical range is considerably narrower than what can exist even within a single NFL positional room.
Look at the athletes who can carry the same designation of NFL wide receiver. One might be 5-foot-9 and 175 pounds while another is 6-foot-5 and 225 pounds. One may have developed as a track athlete with years of high-speed running in his background. Another may make his living as a physical possession receiver who blocks, absorbs contact and wins contested catches. One may be a 22-year-old rookie taking offensive repetitions, covering kicks and running scout-team routes. Another may be a 31-year-old veteran carrying thousands of NFL snaps and a completely different injury and training history.
The computer calls all of them wide receivers.
Physiologically, they may be very different athletes.
That becomes even more important because the athletes who created a team's historical database keep changing. A team's wide receiver room today may consist primarily of veteran players. Two years from now, trades, free agency, injuries, retirements and the draft may have transformed that same room into one of the youngest receiving groups in the league.
The GPS data compilation system for that team and that position group is the same. The positional category still says wide receiver. The database contains more years of information than it did before. But the people who created those numbers are no longer the people standing on the field. That means a database can continue getting larger without necessarily becoming more applicable to the athletes currently being trained.
If yesterday's veteran receiving corps established the workload range governing today's 22-year-old receivers, are we protecting those young players or preventing them from developing the capacity they have? Conversely, if a young, durable receiving corps established those numbers, should those same thresholds automatically be applied several years later when the room is older and carrying completely different physical histories?
More data does not automatically mean more comparable data.
That is why when someone tells me we now have years of information, one of my first questions is:
Numbers from whom?
How many of those players are still on the team? How physically similar were they to the player we are making a decision about today? Were they the same age? Did they have the same training history? Did they play the same number of special-teams snaps? Did they take scout-team repetitions? Had they developed the same tolerance for high-speed running and contact?
I saw those differences firsthand. I could have two receivers in the same positional group who were completely different athletes. One might tolerate an enormous amount of high-speed work while another needed a different progression. One might be playing special teams and taking scout-team repetitions in addition to his offensive responsibilities. Another might be an established starter whose workload was concentrated almost entirely within the offense. Putting both under the same positional limit could make the measurement look precise without making the decision equally precise.
I also watched players accumulate practice workloads that looked extremely high on paper and continue to perform without injury. At times, injuries elsewhere on the roster required a player to take starting repetitions and then additional scout-team work. According to a generalized workload model, that player might have been approaching a red line. But what if his body had progressively developed the capacity to tolerate that workload? What if some of the work we were trying to protect him from was part of what had built his ability to handle it?
Those experiences did not prove that high workloads prevent injuries. They demonstrated something much simpler: the number describing what an athlete did is not necessarily the same thing as knowing what that individual athlete is capable of doing.
That is where coaching still matters.
The number can tell me how far a player ran, how fast he moved, how many accelerations he produced or how his workload changed from yesterday. It can identify a change, raise a question or warn me that I need to look more closely. What it cannot completely tell me is who that athlete is, what he has adapted to, what his position will eventually demand or what he needs next.
One of the comments that always struck home around the NFL Combine was that you can measure an athlete's height, weight, speed, jumping ability and strength, but you cannot measure the fire in his soul or the conviction in his heart. Better measurements give us more information about the athlete. They do not mean we completely understand the athlete.
This is also why I believe technology should never be allowed to grade its own homework.
If a monitoring system tells us that a player's workload is too high and we reduce his work, the fact that his workload went down cannot become proof that the system worked. That only proves we followed the recommendation. We have to evaluate the outcome.
Did the player remain available? Did he perform better? Did he develop the physical capacity his position required? Was he prepared for the workload he eventually encountered in games? Did the intervention actually reduce the injuries or availability problems it was intended to prevent?
Sports science has become considerably more sophisticated since those early years. But sophistication does not eliminate the limitations created by small proprietary datasets, changing rosters and significant differences among the athletes being placed into the same positional categories. If anything, better technology should make us more careful about those distinctions, not less.
The question should never be whether sports science belongs in professional football. It does. The question is how much authority we give the information it produces and whether we understand the limitations of the population behind those numbers.
Ultimately, that brings me back to the question we should have been asking from the beginning:
Are we using the numbers to help us prepare the athlete for football, or are we changing football preparation to satisfy the numbers?
The Preparation Changed. The Game Didn’t.
The NFL has made enormous improvements in the way players are treated and prepared since I entered this profession. We know more about recovery. We understand hydration and nutrition better. Equipment is better. Medical care is better. Coaches have been forced to eliminate many practices and alter physical training programs that existed largely because that was the way football players were callused to the game they were going to play.
Those improvements should continue. But thinking that too much stress can be harmful does not mean continually moving toward less stress is automatically better. Especially when the numbers show that the changes have added to the number of injuries they were supposed to prevent. The training process depends on applying the appropriate amount of stress, recovering from it, and developing greater capacity as a result.
That principle is not unique to football. We cannot prepare someone for difficult circumstances while removing every difficult circumstance from the preparation. We can control the progression, protect the athlete from unnecessary exposure, and use technology to make better decisions, but eventually the preparation has to resemble the demand.
For fifteen years, the NFL and NFLPA have negotiated reductions in preparation partly in the name of player safety while professional teams have invested enormous resources in technology designed to measure nearly every aspect of player performance. Very few injury categories have improved, a fact that is being buried. Other questions involving availability, developmental opportunity, backup preparedness, and the ability to tolerate a longer regular season need to be watched closer than they are being done at present.
The answer is not automatically more practice, and it is not “let’s do less”. After 35 years of doing this work, I believe the responsibility is more difficult than either of those answers. We have to determine what the individual athlete needs, what his position will demand and how much progressive preparation is necessary to make him capable of handling it.
The NFL has become extremely good at measuring how much players do. Where they are dropping the ball is balancing what they do with what do they need to do to weather the harsh world of professional football.
CoachC Insight
For 35 years, my responsibility was never to determine how much work I could make an athlete survive. My responsibility was to understand what the athlete would be asked to do and prepare him to do it. There were veterans who needed work removed because they had already accumulated the repetitions and physical adaptations necessary to perform. There were younger players who needed more opportunities because they were still building those things.
Technology eventually gave us information. What it never did was eliminate the responsibility to understand the individual athlete. Numbers gave non-football people the power to dictate to veteran strength coaches on how to prepare their athletes. Instead of using the point of view of these coaches and their vast experience, they got rid of it. Called them dinosaurs because they knew how to prepare players. They had the rings and the credentials to prove this. But then sports science came in and gaslit ownership and coaches, claiming they could predict injuries and that current training modalities were the cause of all the problems.
We should keep looking for ways to make football safer. We should eliminate unnecessary contact, unnecessary volume, and practices that exist only because somebody believes suffering proves toughness. At the same time, we need to be careful not to remove so much of the preparation that we begin asking athletes to encounter stresses in competition that we were unwilling to progressively prepare them to handle.
Being fresh can be valuable, but freshness by itself is not readiness. Fresh is a condition. Prepared is a capacity.
Teachable Reminders
Reducing exposure to football does not automatically mean reducing the risk when football eventually has to be played.
Veterans and developing players do not always need the same amount or type of preparation.
Recovery is an important part of preparation, but recovery cannot replace the stress required to develop capacity.
Football technique, movement and physical tolerance develop through progressively applied football-specific work.
Sports science should provide coaches with better information, not remove the need for coaching judgment.
Technology should be evaluated by the outcomes it is intended to improve, not simply by the measurements it produces.
Injury totals, injury rates and player availability measure different things and should not be treated as interchangeable.
Protecting players from unnecessary work and preparing them for necessary work are not opposing ideas.
Freshness can help performance, but being fresh does not automatically mean being prepared.
Application Questions
· In your own preparation, are you removing work because it is unnecessary or because it is difficult?
· Are you confusing being rested with being ready?
· Do the experienced people in your organization need the same preparation as the people who are still developing?
· When your best performer becomes unavailable, have you given the person behind them enough preparation to perform the job?
· Are the tools and technology you use improving outcomes, or are you simply collecting more information?
· Do you evaluate a system by whether people followed the process or by whether the process produced the result it promised?
· Where have you reduced exposure without considering whether that exposure was necessary to build future capacity?
· What demands cannot be removed from your job, sport or life, and are you actually preparing yourself to handle them?
