Free Health Dissertations - The Physiotherapist, Personal Trainer And Sports Medicine Specialist Are
The physiotherapist, personal trainer and sports medicine specialist are ideally placed to advise and oversee poor practice in the training arena and to give advice and guidance to maximise training efficiency and to reduce the toll of injury.
Any experienced sports care professional will tell you that the single most important factor in determining the likelihood of sustaining an injury is the occurrence of a previous injury (2). It therefore follows that prevention of any injury will help, not only in improving the immediate efficiency of the player, but will also confer protection against the possibility of recurring injury in any given site.
Before we consider the mechanisms and prophylaxis of injuries in basketball, it would be prudent to consider the observed injuries from the sport, both in absolute number and site. The study by Meeuwisse (2003) (2) followed a cohort of 142 basketball players over a two year period and discovered that 44.7% of the players were injured in that time frame. As they recorded over 200 injuries in that time, it is clear that many players were injured more than once.
The study by Urho M Kujala et al. (1994) (1) will be extensively quoted in this piece as it provides an enormous amount of meticulously collected data which has a high degree of confidence in it’s validity. It was based in Finland where the population has a particularly regimented system of bureaucratic personal information storage, especially with regard to injury and healthcare details. The entire population has to be registered with a nationally based health insurance, which records every accident and injury. This is of enormous value to studies such as this, as accurate statistics about entities such as specific sporting injuries can be derived comparatively easily.
The study is also important in this specific regard as it encompasses an enormous cohort of basketball players analysing 39,541 person years of basketball experience and 3,472 specific injuries. It is worth considering the patterns of injury found in some detail as it has an impact on the deliberations in this piece.
In terms of age distribution, it was found that injuries in the under 15 yr. age group were comparatively rare and that the injury rate peaked in the 20 24 yr. age groups.
Percentage of injuries by sites in basketball players
(These results are slightly modified with some trivia removed)
Injury Site% of total
Lower limb Total 56.0
Thigh2.5
Knee 15.8
Leg2.0
Ankle 31.4
Foot4.0
Other 0.4
Upper Limb total 19.3
Upper arm + Shoulder2.6
Forearm and elbow 1.3
Palm + wrist Fingers 11.1
Other 0.4
Other Sites Total24.7
Teeth5.2
Eyes 3.0
Head + neck7.4
Thorax + Abdomen 1.5
Back5.4
Pelvis 0.9
Multiple sites 1.4
There are clearly a number of striking trends in these figures. The lower limbs sustaining the most injuries with 56% of the total.
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