While sports are fun and beneficial, every sport has its “signature” injuries. Some injuries you can’t avoid (like in boxing, there’s no way to get around your opponent punching in you the face and head. Maybe unless you’re Floyd Mayweather), but the vast majority, you can. The injuries that are non-contact injuries are frequently caused by either improper training methods, or muscular imbalances.

Original source: here.

And whether you participate in a sport recreationally or competitively, taking time off from your sport due to an injury that could have been prevented definitely sucks. And furthermore, spending many hours (and possibly dollars) on the rehabilitation of that injury sucks even more.

So in this article, I’m going to list the most common injuries for:

  • Bicycling
  • Golf
  • Judo
  • Racquet sports (like tennis, squash, racquetball, and badminton)
  • Running
  • Swimming

Along with the most common injuries, I’ll make some suggestions on preventive measures.

Bicycling 

One of the most common injuries in cyclists is IT band syndrome. The IT band (stands for “iliotibial band”) is a thick, dense piece of connective tissue that goes from the hip, all the way down to just below the knee. It looks like this. Its role is in stabilizing the knee joint.

As you can imagine, over a certain distance, the IT band can get inflamed, and pain starts to arise. And that is when you’re diagnosed with “IT band syndrome.”

Since prevention is far better than treatment, what can you do to avoid IT band syndrome? Here are a couple of suggestions:

  1. Increase your mileage slowly. Don’t cycle 30 km one week, and the next week suddenly increase it to 50 km. Build up your volume gradually. This gives the IT band and surrounding musculature a chance to adapt. A rule of thumb is to increase the volume by no more than 10% week to week (that’s 10% relative to your starting mileage). So if you did do 30 km this week, the following week, don’t do any more than 33 km.
  2. Have periods where you purposely drop your mileage. Let’s say you’ve been putting in 100 km per week for a period of 2-3 months, and for you, that’s very high. In that case, you might consider doing 1-3 weeks at 30-50 km per week.
  3. Go for regular therapeutic massage, or foam roll the IT band. An article on foam rolling is coming up in a few weeks.

Another common biking injury is patellofemoral syndrome and infrapatellar tendinitis (in laymen’s terms: pain under the knee).

These two are both frequently caused by misalignment of the muscles surrounding the knee. More specifically, there is an imbalance between the vastus lateralis muscle (the muscle on the outside of the knee), and the vastus medialis muscle (the muscle on the inside of the knee). Here’s a picture of the muscles around the knee.

To balance out the strength between the two, you would emphasize work for the vastus medialis (the imbalance is almost always due to a vastus lateralis that’s stronger than the medialis). How do you do that? Two useful exercises are terminal knee extensions, and step ups.

Golf 

By far the most common area injured in golf is the back. And it’s not like there’s just one thing that can go wrong with the back, there’s many, like:

  • Sacroiliac joint dysfunction
  • Herniated discs (when the fluid in between the vertebrae oozes out)
  • Sciatica (when the nerve that feeds the legs gets “trapped” and irritated)
  • Facet joint syndrome
  • Spinal stenosis (narrowing of the space between the vertebrae)

Oh, and let’s not forget, there’s also golfer’s elbow (the technical term is “medial epicondylitis”).

For prevention, it’s important to perform strength exercises for the core (and when I say “core”, I don’t just mean your stomach muscles. Read the article I wrote about core misconceptions) and mobility exercises for both the mid-back and the hips. You see, frequently, the lower back is injured, but it’s not the fault of the lower back. If the mid-back and hips are tight, excess force goes into the lower back. So you need to optimize range of motion at the joints above and below.

For the elbow, just play tennis as well. There’s golfers elbow and there’s tennis elbow, and they’re on the inside and outside of the elbow, respectively. This will give you balanced development around the elbow. Just kidding. Sort of.

Basically, if you want to figure out what you’re at risk for, and devise a program that corrects your imbalances, you can fill out this questionnaire to see if you qualify to work with us.

Judo 

Besides injuries from your opponents throwing you around like a rag doll, there are certain injuries that happen as a result of muscular imbalances. But the list of affected joints is long. Unlike most sports, where the predominant number of injuries is to one or two joints, with judo, it’s to almost all joints.

So to write short sections on prevention would be a very long article, considering the number of joints that are injured in judo.

Racquet Sports (Tennis, Squash, Racquetball, Badminton) 

By far the most injured joint in racquet sports is the shoulder. The most common issue within the shoulder is inflammation of the rotator cuff.

To a lesser extent, tennis elbow (the technical term is “lateral epicondylitis”) also happens, but not as frequently as shoulder issues.

To prevent any of these from happening, you have to not just strengthen and stabilize the muscles surrounding the shoulder, one key component that must be trained, although it’s rarely done is deceleration. Most shoulder injuries happen after the player strikes the ball. After all, the player must decelerate the racquet, or else it will go flying. The deceleration is actually more stressful on the tendons and muscles than the acceleration.

And so, it’s important to practice deceleration drills in training, so that it prepares you for the court. Here is one video that shows an example of a deceleration drill. Here is another.

Running 

In running, the most commonly affected joint is the knee. There are many reasons for knee injuries, among them:

  • A significant imbalance between the quads (front of the thighs) and hamstrings (backs of the thighs)
  • A significant imbalance between the muscles on the front of the shin (the tibialis anterior), and the back of the shin (the calf muscles).
  • A tight, overactive IT band (again, that’s “iliotibial band”)
  • A general lack of strength in the muscles, forcing the joints, and connective tissue to take the load

Prevention is simple when you know what you are looking for. First, you need to identify whether imbalances are indeed present. There are a couple of ways to determine this that are beyond the scope of this article. After you identify the presence of imbalances, you need to use specific corrective exercises to correct those imbalances.

And if you’re not strength training as a runner, prevention is simple: start strength training. I know you may be thinking to yourself “but I’m an endurance athlete, not a strength/power athlete. Strength training will make me bulky, which will slow me down.” Well, if you train the way a bodybuilder trains, yes, that’s not optimal. As an endurance athlete, you need to use strength training differently. You need to use it to enhance your endurance performance, not for the sake of lifting progressively heavier weights, the way a powerlifter or weighlifter would train.

Swimming 

It will probably come as no surprise that the most commonly injured joint for swimmers is the shoulder.

One of the most common issues with the shoulder is impingement. This is when the tendon from the biceps and the supraspinatus (that’s one of the rotator cuff muscles) gets pinched under a bone. This can cause tendinitis (inflammation of the tendon). Here is what impingement looks like.

To prevent this from happening, it is important to optimize the strength levels between the external rotators and the internal rotators. The next few sentences are about to get very geeky, so if you want, skip down a couple paragraphs.

The rotator cuff is really four different muscles:

  • Supraspinatus
  • Infraspinatus
  • Teres minor
  • Subscapularis

Here is what they look like.

In people who do suffer from impingement, the internal rotators (that’s the subscapularis) are much stronger than the external rotators (the supraspinatus, inraspinatus and teres minor). Additionally, muscles like the pectoralis major and minor will be tight as well.

So what do we do?

  • In the gym, don’t do specific work for the internal rotators. If you’re a swimmer, your internal rotators are already working a lot.
  • Do a lot of work for the external rotators. Here is an example.
  • Work your back muscles much more than you work your chest muscles. Movements like rows, face pulls and wall slides are just what the doctor ordered. Go for a 2:1 or even a 3:1 ratio of back-to-chest exercises.
  • Stretch and do soft tissue work on your chest muscles. Especially the pectoralis minor. Here’s a picture of a stretch for the pectoralis minor.

Hopefully, the message that you get from this article is that it’s much easier and more beneficial to prevent an injury than to treat it after it’s already happened. But the issue is that you have to assess for imbalances between different muscle groups. After all, if you’re not assessing yourself for the presence of imbalances, how do you know the generic advice in this article applies to you? So if you want to have your mechanics assessed, and get a program customized to your unique imbalances, you can fill out this quick, 2-minute questionnaire to see if you qualify to work with us.