How to Avoid Sports Injury

Playing sport is a great way to keep up your fitness, however, sports injuries can occur, which may mean time out from the gym, so what can we do to prevent them from happening, asks Eleni Danis, Australian Institute of Fitness NSW eCoach.

Injuries can often result in decreased fitness and a lack of motivation to return to your chosen sport or fitness activity, so preventing sports injuries should be number one priority. Here are some of the things to consider.

1) Rest and Recovery Overtraining

or overuse injuries can often occur when we don’t allow our bodies enough time to recover after training or following a big game. Our muscles, joints and ligaments need to recover and rejuvenate to be ready for our next training session. And it’s not just our muscles, our nervous system and endocrine systems also need to repair and rest too.

Ensuring that we give our bodies adequate time for recovery is vital, so that we can give 100% effort again in the next training session. Even elite athletes who are training 2-3 times per day need rest in between sessions, and this can also be achieved by varying the intensity of your sessions and by scheduling your sessions to include rest or lower intensity workouts.

2) Correct Form Incorrect Technique

Or poor posture can result in a myriad of muscular and joint injuries, including things such as inflammation, tendonitis and ligament wear and tear. Poor technique may cause some muscles to become tight and others to get weaker, and can impact on our flexibility or range of motion at a joint. It can affect our sporting performance in various ways, such as not being able to bowl a cricket ball fast enough or not being able to sprint fast enough to score that winning try in a footy match.

Learning correct posture, technique and form of the specific movement patterns of a sport can save yourself from injuries later on down the track during competition.

3) Warming Up

Making sure that your muscles and joints are warm by performing some light aerobic activity and adding some dynamic stretches in your warm-up phase is vital in preventing injury. It is a great way to prepare your muscles and joints for the specific movement patterns in your chosen sport and it also prepares the cardiovascular system for the work that you are about to do.

By not warming up appropriately, you increase your risk of muscle cramps, strains and even ligament tears, and you could be out of your chosen sport for many weeks if an injury does occur. Taking some time before your session to warm up appropriately could prevent acute and chronic injuries from giving you grief.

Getting injured while playing sport sometimes isn’t inevitable, but we can definitely take some of the above steps to reduce the likelihood of an injury occurring so we can continue to play and participate in a wide range of sports. Always remember to listen to your body, if you are feeling off our game, or sore and tight, give yourself a break and recover properly.

• Bio

AIF

The Australian Institute of Fitness

The Australian Institute of Fitness (AIF) is the largest and longest established fitness training organisation in Australia, with dynamic training methods and expert course coaches nationwide - spanning fitness, massage and nutrition. The AIF qualifies more fitness professionals than any other provider in Australia, as well as offering a broad range of continuing education courses (CEC), upskilling resources and partnership programs for existing industry.