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Exploring the psychological aspects of sport injury
Exploring the psychological aspects of sport injury

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1 What is sport injury?

Before you begin to investigate the psychological aspects, let’s first explore more about sport injury. As its name suggests a sport injury refers to an injury that is sustained during – or as a result of – sport or physical activity. It is important to note that throughout the course we use the term ‘sport injury’ to refer to injuries sustained in both sport and exercise settings. There are various types of sport injury, which can broadly be split into ‘acute’ and ‘chronic’ injuries. The next activity explains what these are.

Activity 1 Types of sport injury

Timing: Allow about 15 minutes

Watch Video 1 below and then read the article Sports Injuries [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] to explore some of the causes and types of sport injury. (You can open the link in a new tab by holding down Ctrl [or Cmd on a Mac] when you click the link.)

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Transcript: Video 1

Dr. Jordan Metzl
So, there are two kinds of injuries in sports medicine. The acute traumatic injuries, that’s when somebody runs and trips and falls on their hand or their head. Those injuries sometimes just happen in competition. The much more common injury is called an ‘overuse injury’, and that happens when something starts to hurt over time. A great example is like shin splints. If you’re getting pain, if it’s changing the way you move, if it changes your mechanic of how you land, how you run, how you walk, you have to get that checked out before it becomes much more problematic.
Dr. David Wang
The big factor is usually training. Once you’ve gotten to the Olympics, you’ve put in the time, you’re there for a few weeks, there we tend to see more acute injuries. The overuse injuries usually develop right around now as you’re building up and finishing your preparations, because really it’s the amount of activity that you do that leads to the overuse injuries, and really it’s the training where you see the most load through the body. They’re working out in the gym every day, playing, practising every day.
Dr. Brett Toresdahl
Overuse injuries is a broad category which can affect joints, tendons, muscles. It’s something that is essentially volume related, so how much an activity somebody is doing, how often, how intense, and it’s often directly related to how much rest they also have. So making sure that there’s ample time for an athlete to rest and recover can avoid those injuries.
Dr. Jordan Metzl
Common overuse injuries are things like Achilles tendonitis, the Achilles tendon gets sore and it starts to get inflamed over time; shin splints, which can turn into a stress fracture in the shin or in the hip; and runner’s knee, an irritation to the cartilage underneath the kneecap. We treat those injuries by figuring out first of all what the injury is, so we’ll do things like get an x-ray and sometimes get an MRI, and then figure out why the injury is happening. Is it because their muscles are too tight, or because their feet are pronating or rolling in, or because their running stride is too long? We try and fix the reason why it’s happening once we’ve figured out the cause.
End transcript: Video 1
Video 1
Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Now match each of the terms below with the appropriate definition.

Two lists follow, match one item from the first with one item from the second. Each item can only be matched once. There are 2 items in each list.

  1. An individual suffers a broken leg as a result of a tackle during a football match

  2. An individual suffers a stress fracture after increasing their mileage

Match each of the previous list items with an item from the following list:

  • a.Acute injury

  • b.Chronic injury

The correct answers are:
  • 1 = a,
  • 2 = b

Discussion

There are several sport injuries that can be experienced by a sport or exercise participant, but they can all be classified as either acute or chronic. An acute injury is one that develops as a result of a sudden impact, whilst a chronic injury develops over time. Both acute and chronic injuries can be linked with psychological factors as we will explore in this session and throughout this course.