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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 ‘Introduction’ section of 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 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 you know once they once you've gotten to the Olympics you put in the time and you know you're there for a few weeks and you know they're we tend to see more acute injuries the overuse injuries usually develop kind of 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 practicing 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 athlete's 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 and the shin or in the hip and runners in the Entertainer 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 a rolling in or because there's running stride is too long we try and fix the reason why it's happening once we 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.

Using the following two lists, match each numbered item with the correct letter.

  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

  • 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.