updated 6/26/04
Five Ways To Prevent Sports Injuries
Get warm, co-ordinated, relaxed, smart and mobilized!
by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada MOREclose
Credentials and qualifications
I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.
For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.
Credentials and qualifications
I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.
For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.
Weekend warriors and a lot of amateur athletes tend to believe that injury prevention is pretty much all about having a stretching regimen, and they are usually feeling guilty about not doing it enough. If I had a buck for every time I’ve heard someone say, just before a game of ultimate, “I should really do some stretching” … well, heck, I could afford to play ultimate for a living.
Lucky for them, they aren’t really missing anything important. As established elsewhere, stretching doesn’t really work (see Quite a Stretch) for the things people think it does, and it is particularly useless at preventing injury. Here are five ways to prevent injury that are a much better use of your time …
Warm up
The best known was to prevent injury is to warm up.1 Prepare for any intense activity by doing a similar activity less intensely. In other words, start slow! To warm up your tissues, you need metabolic activity: the heat causes physical changes in connective tissues that make them more pliable. Many more complex benefits arise from the stimulus of mild physiological stress.
Cultivate coordination
Many traumatic injuries are probably caused by a lack of coordination — an inability to sense and respond to traumatic forces. Developing coordination takes diligent practice at complex tasks. But you can make some progress simply challenging yourself with a wide variety of activity and sensations, and coordination can be improved.2
Relax
Adaptability prevents injury, and rigidity is the opposite of adaptability. Relaxation is more psychological than golf. To purge rigidity from your system, you will have to go on journey of self-exploration: most tension is emotional and protective. You won’t be able to relax until you know yourself better. Meanwhile, you’ll get more injury prevention mileage.
Play smart, not hard
Many injuries are caused by excessive and misplaced effort! That might seem like a bit of a no brainer, but people need to learn this. I certainly did. It is one of the great lessons of martial arts!
Mobilize
Mobilizations are rhythmical movements that gradually expand your comfortable range of motion, providing your tissues with a variety of stimuli and stresses. The basic philosophy of mobilization is “use it or lose it.” It is a specific method of warming up that also cultivates coordination and relaxation. A link to more information is listed below.
And don’t waste your time stretching! As far as I know, stretching does not have any general injury prevention benefit.
Further Reading
- SY Quite a Stretch — Stretching research clearly shows that a stretching habit isn’t good for warmup, injury prevention, preventing or treating muscle soreness, enhancing athletic performance … or even flexibility!
- SY Mobilizing! — An alternative to stretching that “massages you with movement”
Notes
- Soligard et al. British Medical Journal. 2008. Research has shown for years now that good ol’ stretching doesn’t really prevent athletic injuries. So what does? Warmups that “improve strength, awareness, and neuromuscular control” might just do the trick. Practicing coordination and control, basically (see Panics). In 2008, Norwegian researchers compared injuries in over a thousand female footballers who participated in such a warmup for a season, to another several hundred who didn’t. The athletes with the warmup had fewer traumatic injuries, fewer overuses injuries, and the injuries they did have were less severe. Static stretching was not part of the warmup, but “active” stretching was (i.e. Mobilizing!). Return to text.
- Panics et al. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2008. A general warmup with an emphasis on coordination has been shown to reduce athletic injury rates significantly (see Soligard, for instance). Perhaps it is the neuromuscular or proprioceptive training component of this that causes the effect. A 2008 experiment compared athletes’ with and without this kind of training. Those who did it had a greatly improved sense of joint position. In other words, they really knew where their joints were! “This may explain the effect of neuromuscular training in reducing the injury rate,” the authors concluded. Return to text.