Avoiding Sporting Injury

Injury in sport is a huge issue which could never be fully addressed in a blog post or even an entire book. This blog post will highlight a few issues which tend to go unnoticed by the general sporting population, and to provide strategies which might help reduce the chances of sustaining injury in training and competition.  

It’s quite likely that almost everybody who competes in sport at any level has suffered an injury at some point. Some might have reoccurring injuries they can’t get rid of, others are just ‘injury prone’; persistently sustaining a series of seemingly unrelated injuries. Injuries are an unfortunate part of sport, some of which cannot be avoided. Others however may be avoided by putting some careful thought into preparation and training.

So why are some injuries avoidable and other aren’t? The ones you can’t do much about through physical training are generally contact injuries. For example, a rugby player dislocating a shoulder or a footballer breaking a leg in a tackle may be unfortunate consequences of playing contact sports which will always carry an element of risk. Although these are generally regarded as unavoidable from a physical development point of view, the chances of sustaining these injuries may be reduced if players wear the right protective equipment and are taught correct techniques at an early age to better protect themselves in contact.

The types of injuries that are of interest to sports scientists, strength and conditioning coaches and anyone planning training programmes are those which occur outside of contact. There is evidence to suggest that a large proportion of these injuries may be avoidable. Although many of the injuries in this group may be avoided they are still very common in both professional and amateur sports, as an example, follow this link for current injury data in Premier League football.  

So how do we avoid injury? As a good start, getting strong, maintaining flexibility in the right areas and managing your training load are all good ways of reducing your risk of getting injured and might help keep you on the field of play for longer. 

Strength training plays a crucial role in injury prevention. You need to develop strength in muscles which support joints that may be at risk during high-intensity actions. This is of particular importance in contact sports, where collisions are regularly taken and joints need to be well supported by the muscles. Muscular injuries themselves tend to occur during the eccentric (lengthening) contraction. In order to reduce the risk of this type of injury then the strength of the muscle in these movements must be accounted for and strengthened during training schedules.

In addition to building strength, mobility around joints and flexibility of the muscles is also important in ensuring that you don’t sustain injury. If a muscle is inflexible or a joint is immobile, there may be a higher risk of an injury occurring during sporting competition as the muscle or joint gets forced into unfamiliar positions. To prevent this, a mobility and flexibility which is relevant to the particular sporting movements to be experienced will help keep athletes healthy.

To bring training schedules all together as a productive system, it is important to take into account total training load and stress experienced by the body. Top level teams and athletes have access to high-budget sport science systems to monitor their training. Although this is inaccessible to most people, a simple system is better than nothing at all.  Even a training diary including time spent training and playing will give more awareness of regular routines, and so help to avoid large variations in training load, or total loads which are very high and which may have injury as an end result.