Sports Injuries and Effective Treatment - An Overview

The term sports injury, in the broadest sense, refers to the kinds of injuries that most commonly occur during sports or exercise. Some sports injuries result from accidents; others are due to poor training practices, improper equipment, and lack of conditioning, or insufficient warm up and stretching. Injuries can be classified in two basic categories:1) Traumatic injuries are sudden happenings, in which you know something has gone wrong, and you feel the immediate effects of the injury, perhaps pain, swelling, bruising, or an open wound. The traumatic injury can be extrinsic, or due to some external cause, like a direct blow, a sudden twist as you changes direction, or a fall. It can also be intrinsic, without an obvious cause, like the sprinter's sudden hamstring strain in a race, or the squash player's Achilles tendon rupture. 2)Overuse injuries are subtler, because they come on simply as a gradually increasing pain, directly associated with a particular, usually repetitive, activity. Tennis elbow and runner's shin soreness are examples of overuse injuries.