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McGill Redmen football players participate in a yoga session during the 2011 season. Achieving a basic level of strength, agility and flexibility is still vital in reducing the risk of injury.
Photograph by: Dave Sidaway , Dave Sidaway / THE GAZETTE
Trainers, coaches and athletes have long believed that fit athletes are less likely to get injured, which is what motivates so many athletes to hit the yoga studio, hire personal trainers and build muscle out of season. Yet there?s a new study that suggests pre-season fitness may not have as significant a role in injury prevention as believed.
A research team out of the University of Alberta put 46 male and 40 female university-level volleyball, basketball and hockey athletes through a series of pre-season fitness tests including the vertical jump, sit and reach test, pushups, situps, range of motion and agility assessments. They also collected details of previous injuries and tracked the number of injuries considered serious enough to miss a game or practice.
Added to the mix was the number of minutes the athletes played and practised during the season, which, when combined with the injury data, was used to determine how soon into the season injuries occurred and whether playing time was a factor.
When all the numbers were crunched, they discovered that despite spending months preparing the body for the coming season, a whopping 76 per cent of athletes reported one or more injuries, over half of which were new. Muscle and tendon strains in the lower limbs were the most common complaint.
The majority of injuries occurred during the regular season, with only 34 per cent occurring during pre-season and five per cent in post-season. Over half of those injuries occurred during games as compared to practices, with athletes far more likely to sit out a practice than a game.
What the researchers were really interested in, however, is how far into the season athletes were able to play injury-free and whether their level of physical fitness extended their time to injury.
What they found is surprising.
?Overall, the results indicated that female gender is the most predictive factor in determining time to injury in game or practice, regardless of pre-season performance,? stated the authors. ?Further, volleyball had significantly shorter time to injury than the other sports studied.?
Specifically, female athletes suffered their first injury about 40 per cent of the way into the season compared to the men, who got 66 per cent of their season in before missing a game or practice.
As for volleyball, females made it only 20 per cent into their season before getting injured compared to male volleyball players, who managed to extend their injury-free streak 35 per cent of the way into the season. Volleyball also posted the greatest number of injuries as compared to hockey and basketball.
Surprisingly, male hockey players managed to stay injury-free the longest, playing 80 per cent of the season before reporting an injury.
Between both ends of the spectrum were women hockey and basketball players, who managed to stay healthy until just before midway through the season, followed by male basketball athletes who got through two-thirds of their season unscathed.
As for the role pre-season fitness scores played in delaying injury, the researchers reported two more interesting discoveries. Poor upper body endurance, as determined by pushup scores, and high vertical jump scores, both shortened the time to injury.
The idea that upper body fitness would have an impact on lower body-dominant sports is almost as confounding as the idea that good vertical jump scores increased the chances of sustaining an early-season injury.
The authors suggested that the extreme physical demand of doing a vertical jump inherently places the lower limbs at a greater risk of injury as compared to the skills evaluated in the other pre-season tests. And, since volleyball and basketball players tend to perform more vertical jumps during practices and games than hockey players, it makes sense that hockey has a longer time to injury than the other two sports.
Do these results mean that pre-season conditioning is a waste time? Absolutely not. As the researchers point out in their summary, gender-based differences in injury trends could be linked to a difference in pre-season conditioning, suggesting that female athletes may train differently or require a different type of conditioning than their male colleagues.
And it could be that each sport needs to train and evaluate their pre-season fitness differently in order to determine readiness to play and reduce the risk of injury, a finding of interest to coaches, trainers and the athletes themselves.
Keep in mind, too, that the test subjects were university-aged athletes, which is a far cry from the average middle-aged weekend warrior trying to get in shape for their local beer league.
That said, achieving a basic level of strength, agility, flexibility, and aerobic and anaerobic fitness is still vital in reducing the risk of injury, which means it?s beneficial to get in shape before playing instead of playing to get in shape. And, according to the results, it may be helpful to devote more time to upper body conditioning.
What the findings do suggest is that details regarding what type of training should dominate pre-season fitness programs and whether women will benefit from a program different from men is worthy of further study.
jbarker@videotron.ca
Twitter: @jillebarker
? Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
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Source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/diet-fitness/Fitness+athletes+less+prone+injury/7389078/story.html
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