Athletic Injuries

This seems like a very broad subject but in some ways it isn’t.

All injuries fall into one of two categories.  They are either macrotrauma (sudden force, fall or hit) or microtrauma (repetitive injury or overuse).

Some injuries occur more in one sport than another such as shoulder impingement syndrome in swimmers and baseball players, tennis elbow in tennis players, or knee and ankle sprains/strains in basketball players, soccer players, gymnasts and runners.

There are two major age groups for injuries.  The first group is the weekend warriors age 30 to 50 years old.  The second group is adolescents which are between the ages of 10 and 19 years old, though of course injuries happen at every age from the seven year old that gets hit in the back of the head with a soccer ball and suffers whiplash to someone ninety who missteps during power walking and has a strained knee.

The first group that I will address is the weekend warrior.  Weekend warrior can mean a lot of things but here we will define it as someone that participates in physically strenuous sports only on weekends or part-time.  The majority of their time is spent working in a more mentally challenging environment than physically challenging environment.

You know who you are.  Whether you have decided on basketball, running, soccer or yoga the list goes on; your chances of injury are higher with the more intensity you bring.  The possibility that you will continue through the pain is even higher.  This is not just physically important to you, it is even more important mentally.

By no means should you stop.  That is not the point.  The point is to keep your body going so that you can keep going.  Clichés can be so awful but here one has meaning, ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’.  But even better is ‘resolve the small problem so you don’t get the big problem’.  The big problem is what will stop you.

When you continue with the small or unresolved problem you must compensate in some way for this problem and that will get you into trouble physically.  Sometimes the effort has been made to get the problem resolved but nothing has worked.  Identifying and correcting the ‘Mechanism of Injury’ through the various exercises (from Yoga, to Heavy Weights, to unevenly distributed weight training, all stretches and exercises can be worked with) is a main focus in the ReCAPS System™, our approach is enlightening and it can effectively resolve the perpetuating factors within the details of the exercises.

Now I will address the adolescents group.  If we just select high school boys twenty-seven percent (27%) to thirty-nine percent (39%) will be injured during each year.  When we include all ages, boys and girls, nearly forty-eight percent (48%) suffer some level of injury during the year.

Many of these injuries are minor but often there are repeat injuries after the first if it is not completely resolved.  And herein lies the rub, rarely are they completely resolved with young athletes.  Whether it is just a strained muscle or if there was a facture or even surgery, it gets better but not completely.

These young athletes are enthusiastic.  They want to get back to their team.  They want to show how strong they are mentally and physically.  But they are setting themselves up for long-term problems as they start to compensate for the change the injury caused.  Many big problems, that stop a person from doing the sport they love, could have been stopped early.  This is the beginning for many Still in Pain frustrated patients. It is not necessary for this to happen.