When you have a (sports) injury, you are often balking and want to know where it went wrong and what you can do about it to prevent it in the future. Many cases involve the strain on the body. So you are asking more of your body that what it can handle (capacity).
Endurance vs. load on the body
Your body has a certain endurance capacity. If the load exceeds the capacity, there is a higher risk of pain or injury. If we increase the load slowly, the body's capacity will increase slowly. But if we add that load faster than the body can adapt, there is a higher chance of injury.
Some examples of injuries
If you drop a brick on your foot, the load is much greater than the power and there is no time for an adjustment. A less exaggerated example is someone who goes too hard on training. Think of this as going from no training to doing a (intense) workout daily. Again, the load is greater than the body can handle and although it is not as abrupt as the brick, the body still has no time to adapt. Stress, illness, poor nutrition or too little sleep also affect this. This reduced capacity also makes us more vulnerable to injury.
How does an injury occur?
In fact, an injury is caused by making a wrong movement or, as mentioned earlier, overloading the body. An injury always has one or more causes, such as poor fitness, overweight, pelvic obliquity, and incorrect equipment when training. Of course, an injury can also occur acutely, as in the brick example.
Rebuilding slowly after injury
When you are injured, temporarily try to put less strain on your body by taking rest. But remember that with prolonged rest, the body's capacity also decreases. As a result, it takes less load to get injured again. This makes it necessary to slowly build up your training again until you are at the old level. The important thing to remember is that in the long run, a little strain on the body is good, as long as you keep thinking about the time your body needs to adjust to this. When you do nothing, your body adapts by lowering its capacity. By slowly increasing your activity, your body adapts to this. When you do it too fast you get injured.
More tips to prevent injuries
Building up slowly is very important to avoid injuries. In addition, we want to give you point-by-point tips to help you with this:
- Warm-up and cool-down: this gets the blood circulation going, warming up the muscles and tendons. This is also better for metabolism, allowing muscles to get the necessary oxygen/energy faster.
- Structure of sports training: It is important to match your fitness level in advance to how hard you are going to train.
- A good and healthy lifestyle before, after and during exercise: maintain your weight and eat healthy. During exercise, you will lose a lot of fluids, so it is very important to keep drinking well.
- Good sports shoes: Pay attention to the shoe's shock absorption and grip.
What can FriskFysio do for you?
Our sports physiotherapist treats, guides and advises you if you want to return to sport. Do you have a sports injury? You can contact our sports physiotherapist for this too!
