New To Sport? Here Is How To Prevent Injury
Regular physical activity is an essential component of a healthy lifestyle. It helps to shield us from a variety of common conditions such as heart disease, obesity, type II diabetes, depression, and certain cancers. Sport and exercise are great ways to rack up regular physical activity, but what about when they hurt us?
From organized sports to extreme sports, all physical activity poses a chance of injury. However, before you return to the comfort of the sofa, it is important to keep in mind that the benefits far outweigh the risks, and resisting physical exercise is likely to be the most dangerous choice of all.
However, it is important to understand how you can reduce the risk of injury to continue to enjoy the beneficial effects of sport for many years to come. Of course, there are treatments available for many long-term conditions and injuries – flexiseq gel is one of them. However, prevention is always better than cure, and that is what we are going to look at here.
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Stretch
Any good fitness or sports instructor or coach will tell you about the importance of warming-up and stretching before taking part in any kind of physical activity. Flexibility is key to decreasing your risk of injury, so incorporate stretching into your warm-up routine. Make sure it is planned and purposeful – a few half-hearted stretches before a game or a training session are not going to keep you safe.
Warm-up
Following the previous point, warming up your muscles before exercising or playing sport is vital. Muscles will always respond better when they are warmer and have a higher tolerance for stretching when heated up. Try to incorporate warm-up exercise that mimics the sort of movements that you will be using in the sport that follows it to enhance blood flow to the muscles, increase their elasticity and reduce the risk of injuring yourself quite significantly.
Strengthen up
In both adults and children, strength has been linked to a reduction in injuries. One of the best ways of building up and maintaining body strength is through regular, age-appropriate resistance training. Not only will this help reduce your chances of hurting yourself, but it also has the added benefit of improving your sporting performance.
Ease yourself in
Recent findings indicate that injury risk is basically a result of “training load mistake” – essentially training too much or too little. This suggests that it is sudden or extreme spikes in training loads that tend to lead individuals to injury rather than just training too hard. Build your fitness levels up slowly, maintain a manageable training load where possible, and if you have time off due to injury or sickness, do not return to pre-injury training levels too soon; otherwise, you can find yourself laid up again.
Avoid injuring yourself in the first place Unfortunately, one of the biggest causes of sports injury is having previously experienced the same trauma. With this in mind, one of the smartest things that you can do to minimize the risk is to make sure that you implement the injury prevention recommendations promptly because it can become much more challenging to remain uninjured after the initial injury happens.
Obviously, these do not guarantee that you will not be injured. Accidents happen, and some things just cannot be avoided. There are plenty of other factors that put you more at risk of injury when playing a sport as well. For starters, the type of sport or the exercise you are doing will have some bearing. Football, water sports, and motor sports are up there as some of the more dangerous ones, and if you are male, you are automatically at a much higher risk. In fact, three-quarters of sports-related injuries that happen around the world happen to males, so boys, if you are reading this, follow the precautions that we have listed above to protect yourself.
Age is also a major player when it comes to sports-related injuries. Believe it or not, younger people are more likely to be hurt than their older counterparts. Two-thirds of injuries occur in 18-35-year-olds, and those aged 15-17 are up to ten times more likely to injure themselves than those aged over 65.
The important thing to remember is that injuries are not as common as you think. The benefits of taking part in regular exercise far outweigh the risks of serious injury, so grab your trainers, do some warm-ups and stretches and get out there today.
