Injuries in combat sports - how to avoid them?
2018-03-13
Playing any sport involves risk of injury. Unfortunately, the saying sport is health may apply to recreational sports not really to professional sports. (But we just love sports and what we do. We are aware of the consequences. ) Virtually every athlete faces an injury at some time during their professional career. In any sport, millions of the same moves are made to bring it to perfection.
An example would be on boxer, who strikes the right straight millions of times to make his movement as precise, strong and impactful as possible in time. It also has its consequences. Just like, for example, a light bulb such and our joints and tissues have their cycles of work. The longer and stronger the bulb is lit, the faster it will burn out. It's the same with training. The harder and longer you exercise, the faster your joints and muscles can burn out.
In combat sports training, it is impossible to find an athlete who has not struggled with an injury. More or less extensive.
It is influenced by:
- High training intensity where on fatigue we have the opportunity to make a mistake in the movement pattern.
- Lots of training, putting a lot of strain on joints and muscles.
- Threat external force in the form of an opponent. Because of this, there is a risk of twisting through the lever or breaking the jaw by hitting it.
- Body compensations for better ergonomics of movement.
An example is a collage, which, in order to increase the ergonomics of the movement, escapes with the knees inward( this increases the strength of the thigh muscles, but strongly weakens the hips and exposes them to injury) It is also impossible to mention, avoidable injuries. These are injuries caused, for example, by not warming up enough.
Often you yourself probably know the situation that a player is late for training because of this he starts training right from the target training.
The higher our body temperature, the more flexible our joints are and we have less risk of injury.
As research shows in less-contact sports, it is the majority of injuries that happen at the beginning of training just by not warming up enough, or at the end where through fatigue we are not able to control the position of the joints well.
Your body needs to know that the load will increase, so perform slow movement patterns.
E.g. in boxing, a shadow fight is performed at the beginning of training to signal to the body that training is about to begin. It might seem with MMA it's a more injury-prone sport than boxing. But as MMA statistics show, and in the ground sports, most fights end by judges' decisions. Admittedly, MMA is a relatively fairly young sport, but there are only 3 known fatalities in its history.
Each case is, of course, a tragedy that has befallen the fighters, but comparing the statistics to boxing, 3 confirmed cases in 70 years of fighting in MMA is a small percentage where during the last 100 years of boxing the number of deaths is 1000.
The most common injuries sustained during competitive combat sports training and professional fighting are:
- brain injuries.
- ligament rupture.
- spinal injuries.
- joint dislocation.
- multiple limb fractures with displacements.
- rib fractures damaging the lungs or heart.
- collarbone fractures.
Each is often associated with months of training interruption and equally long painful rehabilitation. This kind of injury, inherent in any contact sport happens at least a few times a year.
Author of the article:
 | Artur Jobda Personal trainer, nutritionist  https://www.facebook.com/artur.jobda |
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