Are Injuries In Sport Inevitable?
The short answer is it depends, mainly on the following:
- Your commitment to being injury free
- The training decisions you’re making or taking from coaches
- The sport you’re playing
Before we dive into these areas, if you don’t want to read any further, in my experience injuries are not inevitable. Most injuries can be prevented and don’t need to happen. Despite this, injuries will continue on their current trajectory.
It’s no wonder when you consider the following sayings are part of the furniture in both recreational and professional sport:
‘Injuries are part of the game’
‘If there’s no injuries they’re not training hard enough’
‘Injuries are inevitable’
For the record injury can be defined as:
“…sports injury denotes the loss of bodily function or structure that is the object of observations in clinical examinations; ‘sports trauma’ is defined as an immediate sensation of pain, discomfort or loss of functioning that is the object of athlete self-evaluations” (1)
Your Commitment To Being Injury Free
Nearly everyone who plays or competes in sport will verbalise they wish to be injury free, yet around 80% of these same people display low to no commitment to being injury free. The best analogy I can think of is everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
Outside of any genetic predisposition and psychology around this, the effort required to offset the physical negatives of your sport are real. And yes for all the fantastic benefits of your sport, there are unfortunately also negatives that compound over time unless you address them. Sir Issac Newton discovered long ago for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. This applies to your sport too.
It’s time consuming, require discipline and there are no shortcuts. The higher the level of your training/competing the more necessary addressing your tissue length, tension, strength and posture becomes.
The Training Decisions You’re Making or Taking from Coaches
This ties in with your commitment to being injury free, but takes it a step further.
How so?
You’re now taking responsibility for the training decisions, not just working around them. Either making them yourself and/or having input with your sports coach.
As far back as 1983 (40 years ago at the time of writing) Tudor Bompa published:
- The Principle of Active Participation in Training
- Principles of Individualisation
In the second chapter titled ‘Principles of Training’ in his famous ‘Theory and Methodology of Training’ textbook.
The training decisions and program you create or follow are upstream from the execution of your training sessions. Therefore some questions need to be asked about it. Here are three to get your started:
- Is it individualised to you in any way?
- Have you had any input into it?
- What assessment/s or data have you collected to make informed training decisions?
The Sport You’re Playing
Let’s talk about injury probability in sport and use four sports as examples: Bodybuilding, Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), Rugby League and Swimming.
The categorisation of sports is probably as old as sport itself. Both Tudor Bompa in the already mentioned ‘Theory and Methodology of Training’ and Ian King in ‘How To Transfer Strength Training’ have created fantastic categorisations of sports in these books. I’ve kept it simple below.
The physical training for Bodybuilding is an individual sport, predictable in terms of exercise movements. Most of the exercises are cyclical. It’s a non contact activity conducted in the controlled environment of a gym.
Bodybuilders are scored via vanity metrics while posing in front of a panel of judges.
MMA is an individual sport, acyclical and unpredictable, meaning the fight can go anywhere at any time (kicking, punching, knee/elbow rage, standing clinch or on the ground). The contact aspect in terms of striking revolves around inflicting bone and soft tissue damage or knocking out your opponent. While cutting off blood flow to the brain and/or deliberately dislocating your opponents joints via joint submissions is the other goal.
MMA athletes are competing against an individual opponent who is also attempting to inflict the equivalent physical damage.
MMA athletes are matched in weight classes and typically of similar weight.
Bouts are usually 3 or 5 rounds with each round 5 minutes in duration and 1 minute rest periods between rounds. Bouts are won via knockout, joint submission, choke or on points determined subjectively by judges.
Rugby League is a team sport with 13 players on the field. It’s acyclical and unpredictable. The contact aspect has a player from the attacking team running into the defensive line and tackled by multiple players from the defensive team.
The game is played on a grass field 100m long x 50m wide. It’s played outdoors in a wide variety of weather conditions (sunshine, rain, wind, heat, cold, day and night).
Games are played in 2 x 40 minute halves with 10-15 minutes between halves. There can be significant height and bodyweight differences between players in different positions.
Swimming is an individual sport and cyclical in nature. It’s predictable in terms of movement requirements. It’s non contact and executed in the water in the controlled environment of a swimming pool.
Events range from 50 metres to 1500 metres.
Probability wise how would you rank these four sports from least potential to most injury potential?
I’ll take a stab and guess you put either Bodybuilding or Swimming as least injury potential and MMA or Rugby League as having the greatest injury potential of these four sports.
It’s evident all things being equal considering the goal of MMA is to outpoint or knockout your opponent via bone and soft tissue damage, joint dislocation or choke. While Rugby League typically has over 500 collision episodes per game on top of repetitive sprinting while fatigued. Both sports have aspects of tacking/wrestling a noncompliant opponent with gravity and the physical earth magnifying the outcomes.
Bodybuilding and swimming each have their own injury potential, including repetitive unbalanced training, technique breakdown, inappropriate training loads and so on. However the potential for injury is lower as bodybuilders and swimmers are in control of their body at all times in controlled environments.
I’m not suggesting injuries need to happen in any of these sports. The injury rates in all of them are unnecessarily high in my view. But that challenge is yours, as a participant, not the sports.
Yes MMA and Rugby League will result in more bodily bruising and corks than swimming without question due to the physical impact of the sports and the need to condition the body for it. Yes, the potential for joint subluxation/dislocation is greater in the grappling aspect of MMA as that is the entire point of submission wrestling. That said training with experienced respectful training partners, tapping early in training (outside of specific drilling for late stage escapes), dropping the ego and understanding the error was made a few steps before your need to tap are strategies to reduce this potential. In addition to optimising your soft tissue length and tension to maintain healthy joints.
It’s your responsibility to get educated. It’s your responsibility to ready your body for the immediate and long term demands of your chosen sport. It’s your responsibility to ready your body for the daily training requirements, which extends beyond training into hydration, nutrition and sleep.
Two thirds or 66% of the focus has been on you – your personal commitment, decisions and actions. One third or 33% focused on the sport you play. You can’t change the stressors of your sport but you can make significant change to your body to deal with the inevitabilities of sport.
