Common injuries among adult athletes
HIGH SCHOOL sports is exciting and challenging that teenagers join every year and are prone to injuries during trainings or games. Injury to a high school athlete can significantly be disappointing to the individual athlete, family and coaches.
As they exude in energy, the pressure to play can also lead to decisions that may lead to injury even with long-term-effects, and cause problems that require surgery as an adult, and may lead to a lifelong problem, thus it is important that sports injuries are treated properly and quickly to ensure the best possible recovery.
Teenage athletes are injured at about the same rate as professional athletes; however, injuries that affect teenage athletes differ from those that affect adult athletes, because they still are growing. Growing in general is uneven: bones grow first which pulls at tight muscles and tendons. These uneven growth patterns make the younger athletes susceptible to muscle, tendon, and growth plate injuries.
Injuries among young athletes are categorized in two basic categories: overuse injuries and acute injuries where both types include injuries of the soft tissues such as muscles, ligaments and injuries of the bones. Caused by a sudden trauma, collisions with obstacles in the field, collision between players which results to contusions, sprains, strains, and fractures are categorized as acute injuries.
Overuse injuries on the other hand are injuries not caused by only a single twist, fall, or collision, these injuries occur gradually over time, where activities are repeated so often and the parts of the body do not have enough time to heal. These injuries affect the muscles, ligaments, tendons, bones, and growth plates.
Also a common overuse injury in young athletes is stress fracture. Where the bone is in a constant turn-over, a process called remodelling, where a new bone develops and replaces the older bone. However, if the athlete has so many activities, the breakdown of the older bone occurs rapidly and where the body
cannot make new bone fast enough to replace it, the bone is weakened and stress fractures can occur-most often in the shinbone and bones of the feet.