Sport injuries are a very common thing among athletes, and maybe the most annoying one too. Picture it, you are at the top of your game, and suddenly you are struck by an injury and cannot train for a longer period of time. It is most frustrating, it sets back your progress, and sometimes even completely stops you from ever playing or participating in a sporting event again. Of course, there are many ways to prevent this from happening, but sometimes it is not up to you at all.
A sports injury is described as an injury that happens to athletes participating in sporting events. They are most caused by an overuse of a certain body part, but the other type, which is much more painful usually, are traumatic injuries. These mostly occur in contact sports (like football, handball, American football etc), due to the fact that there is a lot of collision involved between players. Such collisions have huge amounts of force, and it is no surprise that this can lead to broken bones or even organ damage. Other sports injuries also include muscle strain, a tear of the muscle fibers, contusions, where the small blood vessels are damaged causing bleeding within the tissue, and ligament sprain, a stretched or torn ligament. All these injuries lead to inflammation, causing pain, heat, redness, loss of function and local swelling. This is usually the same for all internal injuries for the first few days.
To prevent such injuries from even showing up, athletes warm-up before any physical training they do. These warm-ups include stretching, raising the heart pulse, and slowly starting any activity, not rushing into it. Sports injuries can also be prevented by using proper equipment, which is constantly being improved to minimize any such injury.
Sport injuries can happen to all sorts of body parts, like foots, toes, legs, ankles, knees, thighs, hips, back, shoulders, elbows. The most common injuries, or the most commonly injured body parts are:
Knee injuries are one of the most occurring sport injuries. This is due to the fact that made up of four different parts, and because in almost any sport you need to use your legs, and this can easily wear off the components in your knee. With a knee injury you can have difficulties walking, any may even need a replacement.
Dislocations are injuries where the ends of your bones are forced out of position. This happens often in contact sports, and recovery can last for a couple of weeks. You cannot move that joint during that time.
Fractures are breaks of the bones. These can happen due to overuse of certain body parts. The bone will not usually break all the way, but it will have tiny fractures in it. To recover from this you will sometimes need to wear a cast, or even have surgery, which uses screws, plates or pins to keep the bones in place.
Other health problems in sports that can sideline a player are diseases. They are all human, and a therefore affected by all sorts of colds, coughs or some other, maybe even more dangerous diseases. But the most harmful thing that can happen to an athlete are organ problems. Such an example is Spain's footballer Ruben de la Red. He is only 25 years old, and he had to end his promising sports career because of serious heart problems, which even caused him to collapse during a game back in 2008. It is a sad a cruel faith for any players, because he spent his whole life working hard to achieve something in sports, only to have it all taken from him.
Sports injuries are a common thing in sporting events. The best way to prevent them is with proper warm-up and usage of good equipment, but sometimes nothing can help you from stopping participating in the sport you love.