Injury Prevention

Why injuries happened

· Lack of warm up

· Lack of stretching

· Lack of proper equipment or facilities

· Lack of knowledge of sport or exercise

· Never engage in sports or exercises without proper instructions

· Never stretch or exercise to the point of pain. If it hurts, stop!

· Eat properly, drink plenty of water and get plenty of rest between exercise, practice sessions or games.

· Fatigue

To help you prevent the pain and suffering of sport and exercise injuries, follow these basic rules:

· Always ware proper protective equipment for the sport of choice (helmets, wrist/knee/elbow pads, mouth guards, etc...)

· Get a physical exam at least once a year

· Exercise and perform within your limit

·

Sports injuries can be prevented by considering a wide variety of factors such as the environment of a particular sport, fitness levels, protective equipment and nutrition.

Sports environment

• The sports environment includes not only the weather, but also the facilities, surfaces and equipment that are being used.
• Poor, wet or slippery surfaces, lack of goalpost padding or safety netting, obstacles to trip on and sharp objects, can all lead to injury.
• Rules of the game need to be enforced and sometimes modified for children.
• A safe environment will reduce the number of potential injuries.

Fitness

• One of the easiest ways to help prevent injury is to stretch. By warming up your muscles, you make them more flexible.
• Adequate fluid intake is important; preferably cool drinks should be taken before, during and after playing sport.
• Correct technique and appropriate training helps improve fitness. Monitoring increases in activity to prevent the child from doing "too much, too soon" will help minimize injury.
• Make certain that old injuries are adequately rehabilitated before continuing to participate in a sport.
• Protective equipment such as eyewear, mouth guards, wrist, elbows, knee and shin guards, helmets, tapes and braces all contribute to safety. Make sure shoes are appropriate for the sport.
• "In one recent study of rugby players, mouth guards were the most common protective equipment item worn, (55% by players in schoolgirl's grade to 73% in Senior A competition). The next most common item was taping of body joints such as the ankle, knee, and hand."

INJURY PREVENTION TIPS

( l ) Avoid training when you are tired. Tired muscles provide inadequate support for tendons, ligaments, and bones, increasing the risk of strains, sprains, and stress fractures.

(2) Make sure that you increase your consumption of carbohydrate during periods of heavy training. Muscles which are low on carbohydrate are tired muscles, leading to the problem mentioned in recommendation No. 1. If you're an endurance athlete, you need about 200-225 calories of carbohydrate per stone of body weight during strenuous training.

(3) Continuing to build on the 'fatigue produces injury' theme, you should bear in mind that increases in training necessitate increases in resting, too. Anytime your training volume increases by more than 2-3 per cent, you need to make sure that you're getting more sleep and taking more time to rest during the day. Otherwise, you're not really training; you're trying to tear yourself down.

(4) Remember a key principle of training: total training time doesn't automatically build upon itself. If you've been training for three hours per week, for example, that does NOT mean that you're ready to step up to three and one-half hours per week. Any increase in training should be preceded by an increase in strengthening so that your body is really ready to take on the new load. Runners, for example, should go through a strengthening period emphasising drills to boost leg-muscle power before they attempt a significant upswing in mileage. Tennis or squash players should work on their shoulders and legs before they upgrade their playing time.

(S) Be especially careful if you're a relative newcomer to your sport. If you've only been participating in it for a few months, you're much more likely to be injured, compared to someone who's been active for several years, simply because the latter individual has had more time to strengthen the appropriate muscles and connective tissues.

(6) Treat even seemingly minor injuries very carefully to prevent them from blowing up into big problems. Remember the time-honored acronym RICE--rest, ice, compression, and elevation--when a small injury strikes. Rest gives the afflicted area time to heal, ice reduces inflammation and swelling, and compression and elevation lessen swelling, promoting healing.

(7) Working with your doctor, take anti-inflammatory medications to control pain and reduce inflammation and swelling which occur as a result of your sports activity.

(8) If you experience pain during a workout, stop your training session immediately. A temporary loss in training time and fitness is far better than long-term damage to your body. Many athletes produce chronic deterioration of a knee joint or another anatomical region by insisting on training through pain. Remember that you're in sport for the long run; a lost month of training to rehabilitate a damaged knee is much better than having to quit your sport completely sometime in the future because of joint degeneration.

(9) If you want to toughen your training without raising your risk of injury too much, another good strategy is to slightly raise your average training intensity (speed), instead of tacking on lots of additional volume (miles) of running, cycling, swimming, or walking.

The concept of injury prevention
Avoid injuries, it can be divided on three levels :

• Avoid the possibility that injuries occur (primary prevention).
• Treat a injury the best possible way (secondary prevention), so that permanent damage does not occur.
• As good as possible after treatment of the injury (tertiary prevention), in such a way that an injury does not repeat itself.

The rugby trainer has the most important task concerning the primary prevention. First aid is essential. The trainer must be aware that he could put the treated player too soon into the match.

When one wants to avoid injuries, one should know how injuries occur. The factors that create injuries can be divided into two groups: individual bound factors and environmental bound factors.

Individual bound factors are: Presence of a physical deviation or illness Level of physical fitness Psychological factors Body structure Age of a youth

Environmental bound factors are: Sports accommodation Sports gear Specific weather conditions Trainer Referees

How To Avoid Injuries
Measurements are:

• Medical Sport tests
• Warming-up and cooling-down
• Technique, have a look at my rugby tackle page
• Revalidation
• Taping
• Rules
• The playing field
• Sports gear
• Education
• First aid

Warming-up
The warming-up has 3 functions.

1. The rugby player performs better after a warming-up because of the elasticity of his muscles is higher.
2. He prepares himself physiologically AND mentally for the training or the game.
3. A good warming-up reduces the risks of injuries.

An active warming-up can be divided in 3 stages :

1. Getting on temperature,
2. Muscle loosening and dynamic stretching exercises, (I use the Dynamic Flex method from SAQ)
3. Specific rugby warming-up is with coordination exercises, for 5 - 10 minutes.

I have set up a special page on warming up and included some running technique drills.

Cooling down
Cooling-down is in fact the opposite to the warming-up: like the body adjusts slowly from a rest position into a strained position, so it gradually needs to return from a strained position into a rest position. A cooling-down should consists of :

• Easy run in a slower pace, a calm jog, varied with hopping passes. The SAQ Dynamic Flex routines
• Sway with the legs calmly. Do this for 3 - 5 minutes.
• Quiet and easy exercises at the spot. This is in principle in motion with gravity.
• For instance bending forwards with the torso (trunk) and dangling the Shaking the legs or let the legs be shaken.
• Stretching exercises.
• Warm shower followed by a short, cold shower.
• (Books tell me: "Eventually a massage", yeah right! Not at the clubs I trained......)

This information was written by Azmil B Mustapha

as an assignment for 'Athletic Training'