Gymnastics is a sports event that you can perform and for that, you have to train for balance, flexibility, endurance, strength, coordination, and agility. Artistic gymnastics is the most commonly seen form of gymnastics in competitive gymnastics. Women gymnasts can perform in gymnast events in beam, floor, uneven bars, and vault. The male gymnasts can perform floor, rings, patellar bars, rings, horizontal bars, and pommel horse. These are the common apparatus that gymnasts use while performing the sport.
This sport includes sudden movements of the legs, arms, shoulders, chest, back, and many of the muscles in the abdomen.
Gymnastics Injury Prevention
Common gymnastics injuries are wrist fractures, ACL tears, ankle sprains, spinal fractures, cartilage damage, shoulder instability, collarbone fractures, and herniated discs. You can also have mild to extreme pains in many body parts.
The main causes of gymnastic injury can be lack of flexibility, landing on the floor or the beam in the wrong position, missing the grip on the bars, losing balance while performing or while landing, strength decreasing in core or arm or leg, or an imbalance between the strength applied to both the body sides. All these are sudden injuries and in gymnastics you can also suffer from overuse injuries, which are the ones that happen to your muscles or joints when you are constantly using them for a longer period.
Common Ways To Prevent Gymnastics Injury
🔹 Practice Safe Training
To prevent gymnastics injury, it is always encouraged to indulge in training and practices that are safe.
🔹 Warmups Matter
It is essential to warm up before every session of gymnastics training. You also have to warm up before you do other training exercises.
🔹 Strength Training
It is advised to do strength training other than the gymnastics workouts and make progress gradually.
🔹 Core Training And Flexibility Training
Training the core of your body to become strong and practicing to increase flexibility is significant.
🔹 Preparing Mentally
Mental preparation is a huge part of gymnastics as you need to overcome fear and build confidence.
🔹 Dress Properly
The costume that you wear should be the right fit for you, not too tight, not too loose.
🔹 Use Safety Gears
Such as heel pads, grips, and wrist braces.
🔹 Stop Putting Pressure On Yourself
In gymnastics, the performers strive for perfection and perfection can only be obtained after dedicated and long periods of training. Even after all these at times you might not be able to end the performance in the perfect way that you wanted to. In such cases do not be hard on yourself and keep going and take breaks whenever necessary.
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Gymnastics Injury Recovery
- Do not minimize your injury
- Get medical assistance at the right time
- Stop performing when you feel the pain
- Immobilize the injury
- Get proper and complete rest
- Ice the injury
- Elevated the injured part
- Compress the injury
- Give importance to the injury and train other parts
If you have injured your leg, focus on strengthening your upper body when you are under rest. If your wrist has been injured, train your legs and lower body when you are under rest.
The Bottom Line
Gymnastics is a sports event in which no one can predict what can happen next. Even a slight balance when they grip the beam or a wrong position when the gymnasts land back on the ground can cause an injury. Very minor changes in the movements might result in major injuries.
As a gymnast, your goal can be perfection, but first, you need to have patience. When talking about gymnastics injury you should always be prepared to get injured. When you realize that you are injured, get medical help right away and take a break from the practice. Take rest, build yourself, and return.
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FAQs
Q. How do you recover from a gymnastics injury?
You can do yoga, cycling, pilates, and dynamic and static stretching depending on the type of injury that you have.
Q. What are the risks of gymnastics injuries?
If the gymnastics injury is not treated properly at the right time it can result in chronic pain and bone fractures.
Q. What is the injury rate in gymnastics?
Among gymnasts, most injuries are found in female gymnasts. Approximately 12.3 percent of every 100,000 participants get injured.
