MILLIONS of people around the world play various sports and participate in other forms of physical exercises. The rigours of their physical routine demand that they take extra special care of their body. And the branch of medicine that takes care of this is simply called, sports medicine. Working in the background, sports medicine has been defined as the medicine of exercise or the total medical care of the exercising individual.
Clinical sports medicine includes injury prevention, diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, performance enhancement through training, nutrition, psychology, management of medical problems caused by exercise and the role of exercise in chronic disease state.
Sports physicians are skilled with the knowledge of many different subjects that includes clinical and non-clinical. This includes podiatry, family medicine, orthopaedic, physiotherapy, nutrition, sports psychology, exercise physiology, biomechanics and sports training.
There are a variety of injuries in sports. They include tennis elbow, pitchers elbow, footballers groin, jumpers leg, jumpers ankle, boxers arm, paddlers wrist, squash player fingers, triple jumpers knee and shot putters finger.
In cricket, Pakistan’s most watched and favoured sport, it is the bowler who is more susceptible to injury than the fielder and the batsman. And in bowlers, it are the fast bowlers who are more prone to injuries than the spin bowlers. The most to least common site of injuries in fast bowlers is the thigh followed by calf, ankle and least commonly injured is knee.
In spin bowlers, it is the shoulder that gets injured the most, followed by the lower back. Back injuries in fast bowlers too are common and causes pars interarticular defect. Apart from receiving a blow or falling, the vast majority of aches and pains could be avoided if we looked after ourselves properly. We tend to do too much too soon, such as gardening at the first glimpse of spring or playing sports without stretching or adequate training, with a little thought and effort. We can go a long way to prevent injuries. To avoid injuries in first place, there are three simple rules to follow.
BE FIT FOR THE TASK: Even if you are generally fit, you still need to be specifically fit for the rigours of your particular task. Methodical exercise rather than violent, sudden efforts should be used to build up the correct balance of flexibility, strength and endurance.
WARM UP AND WARM DOWN THOROUGHLY: Even if your body is not highly tuned and super fit, it will perform better when warm, just like a car engine. Warming up requires more than a few seconds flapping the arms, as the stretching exercise show, a minimum of five seconds of these and at least another five minutes to warm down. Again using stretches not only prevents stiff, sore muscles the next day, but also increases your general fitness.
USE THE RIGHT EQUIPMENT AND TECHNIQUE: Your body is different in shape and size from anyone else’s. So the design of a running shoe or the weight of the racquet head, the position of a car seat or computer keyboard must suit you individually, thus technique is as just important. If faulty, the technique can cause injury, whether paddling a kayak or lifting a box of groceries. In sports training a certain way may suit one person’s body and shape and produce a gold medal. But if those methods produce injuries in you, use another technique that don’t, always go at your own pace.
If there is one lesson to be learned, it is that millions of injuries are caused by sudden, unaccustomed exercise, or by training to hard for a sports event. These are often referred to as ‘overuse injuries’ and occur when one part of the body has been asked to do too much. Quality rather than quantity of work is what counts. More is not necessarily better. Similarly if you have been totally inactive for years, you should allow about one month’s proper training for every year of inactivity in order to regain past levels of fitness.
Think of that spring gardening session. With two or three hours spent bending, stretching and pulling, no one would dream of asking that gardener to go out and run a marathon without some preparation. Yet his body is being asked to do the same sort of sudden exertion, and it does not like it.
Whether you are a postal worker or a marathon runner, a truck driver or a tennis star, stretching exercises also help to keep your muscle supple and toned for the rest of your life.
Stretching exercises can be used at any time of the day or night as part of an effort to keep fit for warming up before training and competition. Stretching can be carried out anywhere, at anytime, a few moments in the lift, in-between the ironing and bed-making, while waiting for the bus. In addition to stretching muscles, tendons and ligaments, there is evidence that proper stretching actually builds strength.
