Injuries are a part of sports.

Limiting injury can play just as much a role in a game’s outcome as anything else, and more than a week before the Sept. 8 NFL kickoff, 28 players are already on injury reserve.

Since the lockout ended in July, the NFL has seen a rash of injuries, possibly as a result of players being away from team offseason workouts for so long.

The lockout resulted in the cancellation of organized team activities, which include team offseason workouts. During this summer’s 130-day NFL lockout, football players had to find a way to keep up with their conditioning and stay in the best football shape without the aide of team trainers.

The injury bug spread to Detroit Lions rookie running back and former Illini Mikel Leshoure on Aug. 8 when he tore his Achilles tendon in practice, which will cause him to miss the upcoming season.

Illini running back Jason Ford said he reached out to his former teammate Leshoure the day after his injury.

“I just told him to keep his head up and keep working hard and try to get better from that and come in next year, show what he can do,” Ford said.

With Leshoure and so many players in the NFL suffering injuries, the Illini coaching staff has been stressing the importance of offseason workouts to its athletes.

“When you look at the things that have happened in the NFL and the correlation that has to do with a lack of preparation, their endurance and various football specific movements, you’re going to have some type of situation,” head football strength coach Lou Hernandez said.

Hernandez said the Illini’s offseason workouts are very important and have a lot to do with a player’s performance during the season. As summer begins, he said the Illini go through a basic conditioning phase that helps players get in shape for high-velocity activities in June.

Ford said the Illini hold players accountable for missing offseason workouts. If someone misses a workout he has to do 300 floors of stairs, and a missed 7-on-7 during the summer results in 100-yard sprints.

Ford also said the team’s workout plan is beneficial.

“We just have to do a great job with all the different workouts we do and it forces you to push yourself,” Ford said. “We do a lot of mental things that help you try to fight through things, even though you’re tired.”

Illinois athletic trainer Randy Ballad said one of the greatest assets of being at a large university is that staff has the equipment to make sure players are prepared and in shape.

“They (our athletes) do everything from agility to weightlifting to running,” Ballad said. “The demands of playing a sport in the heat can’t be replicated, so we try our best to prepare them for the season.”

The Illini enter the football season relatively injury-free and there have not been many major injuries in any of the Illini sports so far this season.

“At times because of a lack of preparation, personal activities or lifestyles, people may just show up out of shape but you can’t address everything,” Ballad said. “So with the NFL you never know what some of the players were doing during the lockout and maybe they thought the lockout would go longer.”

Ballad said he had begun to notice that every year it’s becoming more challenging to keep athletes in shape, and he thinks it is because of lack of physical activity.

“More and more kids are unprepared, whether it be because of video games or the fact that people are becoming less and less active,” Ballad said. “It seems as though every freshman class seems a little less physically competent than the last.”

This year’s NFL training camps were without two-a-day practices, commonly held to get players football-ready, which the NFL’s new collective bargaining agreement eliminated to protect player safety. The NCAA mandates that colleges can have two-a-day practices and has shown no indication of working to eliminate them.

Hernandez said practicing twice a day can be very demanding, so the Illini keep player safety in mind by having one lighter practice and then another in full pads. Ballad said some of the coaches think eliminating two-a-days would actually increase injury.

“Two-a-days help build the ability for our athletes to handle the strain of the demands of the season,” Ballad said.

But Ford said he doesn’t really mind two-a-days as part of the preparation for the season.

“I’m just tired of the meetings all day,” Ford said. “Now we can cut down on them.”