Participation in sports has been growing by great amounts in the last few decades . As a consequence, so has sport related injuries. A main cause of this is when the same sport is played year round. You spend the whole year working on the same parts of your body in the same ways. As you become more active in your sport, you are more susceptible to injuries, due to overuse. This has become a persistent problem at FHS since the Boston Globe ranked us as number 4 in head injuries in Mass.
The solution that doctors recommend is to play multiple sports and/or take seasons off for a break, but we know that that’s not going to happen. There is a lot of pressure for us to do well from everyone around us and ourselves, but more importantly, you can’t just stop something you love, to heal. To athletes, it doesn’t seem to be worth it.
Many athletes will play on injuries and ignore them so that they don’t get taken out of the game. That prolongs the healing process.
So, what do we do?
Before you get out there for practice or a game, warm up and stretch to prevent pulling or straining anything.
Also, if you are playing a sport for FHS, then you can see the trainers. They do preseason training and during your season. It’s very cheap too. Just send in one check and you are good for the whole season. There, you can work on getting better in your sport, but also you can work on strengthening your lesser used muscles and do sport-injury-prevention exercises.
In addition, if your injuries are really bad, then take those couple of weeks off now before winter tryouts, so you will be on your game for and after tryouts. Or, if you are mid-season ask your coach to let you play different positions to work on different muscles and relieve other muscles.
Don’t let sports injuries be then end of your season.