Ok just checked this up in the net... because i've been having
some aches and pains at certain areas sometime while playing
football or after the match. I make a dive and next thing i know is
that my knee hurts and i'm limping and i dunno what
happened...
If you are a serious soccer player, what are your chances of
sustaining a serious injury? What can you do to lower your injury
risk?
To find answers to these key questions, researchers from the San
Jose Earthquakes professional soccer team and the East Bay Sports
Medicine and Orthopaedic Associates in California recently followed
237 Major-League soccer players over the course of a full season.
The players ranged in age from 18 to 38.
The researchers defined a minor injury as one that interrupted
participation in practice or play for a period of less than one
week, a moderate injury as one necessitating absence for more than
one week but less than one month, and a major injury as a malady
which caused an inability to participate lasting for more than one
month.
No position (midfielder, goalkeeper, defender, or forward) was
associated with a higher rate of injury, but games were
significantly more risky than practices.
Knee injuries were the worst
As you might expect, the majority of injuries (77%) occurred in the
leg, with 21% involving the knee and 18% striking the ankle
(many other studies point to the knee and
ankle as the most common sites of injury during soccer).
Knee injuries resulted in the most time lost from competition and
produced the greatest number of cases requiring surgery. At the
ankle, lateral sprains were more common than medial ones (ie,
damage to the outside ankle ligaments was much more likely than
harm to the inside ligaments).
There were also a considerable number of strains of the
hip-adductor muscles, the hamstrings, and the quadriceps.
The hip adductors, or groin muscles, were the hottest trouble spot,
accounting for 53% of muscle strains, with the hams checking in at
42% and the quads adding just 5% to the total mayhem.
This new research supports other studies which have also suggested
that games are particularly risky from an injury standpoint,
compared with practices. In one study, researchers found that there
were 16.9 injuries per 1000 hours in games, versus 7.6 injuries per
1000 hours in practices ). In another investigation, the rate of
injury during games was pegged at 13 per 1000 hours, while practice
logged only three injuries for each 1000 hours of
participation
How does soccer stack up against other sports in terms of injury
risk?
Although endurance running is often considered to be a high-injury
sport (about 50 to 65% of all endurance runners are injured in an
average year), the actual rate of injury in running is comparable
with that of soccer. Various studies suggest that the running
injury rate is about five injuries per 1000 hours of running, with
little difference between training and competition. This is a
little higher than the 'practice' rate of injury for soccer but
much lower than soccer's competition-related injury rate. Injury
rates in other sports have been poorly studied, but it appears that
soccer has one of the highest rates of athletic damage