Preventing Sports Injuries
From the Article I write monthly for The Chapel Hill News……..
Preventing Sports Injuries
David Hansey
NASM Certified Performance Enhancement Specialist
NASM Certified Sports Fitness Specialist
NASM Certified Personal Trainer
The best time to decide you are going to train to prevent injury is before you even begin participating in a sport. This is the time to sit down with your doctor and your trainer and review your fitness level and overall health. Are you seriously overweight? Then it is great that you want to get in shape and play a sport but it is also crucial that you review the requirements of the sport. Are you going to put undue pressure on your joints because you are overweight or not conditioned? Then it would be prudent to ensure you get in better condition.
Kids are a perfect example here. Kids today cannot go from couch to playing field. Most of them are just not in condition to play many sports without serious risk of injury. It is important that your body be conditioned to handle the demands of your sport. A study conducted by the National Association of Sport and Physical Education found that 50% of sports injuries are from overuse. You know these injuries. These are your tennis elbow, your golf elbow, your lower back from golf, your shoulder from baseball, etc.
The more interesting part of that study was that half of the sports injuries studied were found to have been preventable. How do you prevent them? By warming up, doing proper training for the sport and changing poor mechanics.
Many of us feel we understand these concepts. However, most people do all of these incorrectly or not at all. Warming up is NOT stretching. It is getting the muscle limber and warm so it can handle the demands of stretching during the sport. So, for example, if your sport is golf, this would mean moves like lunges and arm circles more than stretches.
Training for sports is another area where many people think they are doing the right thing. Even coaches get this one wrong. Even professional coaches have had this one wrong at times. Consider the elite tennis player. Coaches in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s used long distance running as a training tool. The mileage these athletes ran was great for cardiovascular conditioning but did nothing for the court game and did damage to joints. Tennis does not require that you can run at a steady pace in a forward motion for several miles. It requires you to run in many different directions (half of the game is lateral movement) in quick sprints. By running long distances, the athletes were never actually training for the sport.
Poor mechanics is the third item. Many sports injuries are caused by this. Poor mechanics means you are not performing the move correctly. Normally this is due to the fact that you have weak or tight muscles that do not allow you to perform the move correctly and you compensate for those. An example is to do a squat and see if you move your knees in or out or turn your feet or lift your heels. Those are all compensation moves that make up for weak and tight muscles. Continually doing moves incorrectly can lead to injury because you put undue pressure on your joints. All the training in the world will not help you improve if you do not identify and target the weak and tight muscles and take steps to do corrective exercises for those muscles.
For more information on Sports Specific Training, call me at Gold’s Gym at 770-949-1116 or visit my website at www.4fitbodies.com. If it has been a while since you have seen the doctor and want to start an exercise program, get a physical. West Atlanta Internal Medicine (770-942-6903) can give you a comprehensive physical and advise you on any medical issues you may have.
