Injury Prevention – Injury 101: Overuse vs Accidents

Time to talk about everyone’s least favorite sports topic… Injuries.

This topic isn’t fun or captivating because we won’t be talking about improving performance. But knowing how to prevent an injury can save months or even years of training time over an entire sports career. We’ll need to understand when an injury might come up so that we can anticipate and prevent it from occurring. There are two major types of injuries.

First, we’ll talk about accidents, which is what most people think of when they think of an injury. But in my experience, this is the least likely type of injury when working with experienced coaches and an organized program. An accident is exactly what it sounds like. Sometimes when training, you might slip, make a mistake during a skill, or during practice, things can get a bit too physical and someone gets hurt. Preventing accidents from happening isn’t always possible, but there are some ways we can reduce the chances of an accident.

Number 1: Preparation. Knowing what to do during a fall or poor situation can minimize the damage when an accident comes up. Practicing how to break your fall, or if you train in a padded environment, falling on your butt or back will be preferred over sacrificing your arms. Ask your coaches about this if they haven’t already gone over the safety falling procedure. At an organized program, understanding how to fall will be a normal part of training.

Number 2: Control. Athletes that show lack of coordination will get into accidents at a much higher rate. Learning to control your body and moving with purpose are habits that most people can learn. Habits being the key word. Is your movement at practice efficient? Are you falling down a lot? Are you precise with your skills? Does your brain activate the exact muscles you need to use or do you only move off of instinct? Trying to discard unnecessary movements and become more precise in your practice is the first step. Achieving this takes a lot of mental energy and a lot of reminders. If you see your athlete is less coordinated than their peers, I would recommend a few exercises to improve their coordination at home. Catch is a great pastime which parents and youth athletes can do together. Use a tennis ball and make sure they move as little as possible to catch the ball and to throw it back. Next is Dance, make sure they pick a type of dance they find fun. Any will work since dance is pretty precise and learning choreography will help improve their coordination, and is usually very fun.

Next, let’s talk about the most common type of injury: overuse. Exactly what it sounds like, wear and tear caused by practice can cause damage to a certain area. Over time if not recovered, this wear and tear can cause minor to even major injuries. These injuries will come up over and over again if the athlete doesn’t recover properly. Here’s my advice to not let overuse injuries ruin your athlete’s career.

1. Identify. First is understanding when something is painful. I classify pain to students simply like this, if it hurts during an exercise but not when you finish the exercise, this is probably healthy stress, and will get stronger over time. If it hurts during an exercise AND after an exercise without going away, now we should be alarmed. When we feel pain after an exercise that is persisting, it is time to be vocal.
2. Be vocal. Tell your coach about the persisting nagging pain. Your coach will then lead you in the right direction to avoid the injury. Or, they might have you continue training depending on the circumstance. But speaking up is more than most athletes will do at young ages.
3. Recover. Avoiding the injured area is not enough to recover properly. Make sure to eat lots of protein, and follow the guidelines listed in the recovery course of Ember Academy. The goal is to miss as little training time as possible.
4. Fortify. After the damage has recovered, that doesn’t necessarily mean our job is done. What’s to say the overuse problem won’t come back? It might feel better for a few weeks, but in general, there is a structural problem that needs to be corrected in order to stop the issue from coming up again. Locate the weakness and add exercises in your routine that strengthen the muscles that control the weakened area. Once these muscles are strengthened, the overuse injury will rarely come back if at all.

Find out some common sports weaknesses and how to correct them by exploring the rest of our injury prevention course.