Ten thousand steps and more. However, injuries are inevitable or almost inevitable, they are the nightmare of every athlete and sportsperson, whatever their level, even beginners. This can be devastating: two thirds of athletes (65%) report at least one injury that has forced them to stop practicing for a season, underlines Professor Pascal Edouard, sports doctor at the Saint-Etienne University Hospital and researcher at the Interuniversity Laboratory of Motor Biology (LIBM) of the Jean-Monnet University of Saint-Etienne.
If you want to get back into or resume sport, driven by the Olympic and Paralympic Games, be careful. “Running-related injuries are very common, especially among beginning runners”reports the blog of British Journal of Sports MedicineSeptember 2. This article is based on a study published in late June in the same journal, conducted in Finland with researchers from Calgary (Canada) and the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences.
The 325 participants (245 women and 80 men), regular runners in good health, between 18 and 55 years old, ran twice a week for twenty-four weeks. “The weekly prevalence of overuse injuries was 39% lower among individuals who performed hip and trunk strengthening and neuromuscular control exercises compared with the control group”the study indicates. On the other hand, “No significant difference was observed between the group of novice runners who performed ankle and foot exercises compared to those who did standard stretching.”
Each time, the exercises were performed twice a week, for twenty to thirty-five minutes, with seventy-five minutes remaining. Injuries and running exposure were recorded using weekly questionnaires completed on an app.
Preventive exercises
Specific prevention programmes are available. This is where the Get Set smart training app, designed by the International Olympic Committee for the 2014 Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing (China), came into being. Football, rugby, athletics, tennis… Each federation also offers different types of exercises, to be performed before or after training.
But studies are not always conclusive. Thus, the work carried out in 2021 by Pascal Edouard with 840 members of the French Athletics Federation, who were training for competition purposes, showed no difference in the risk of injury between the group that had to carry out a programme with preventive exercises and the group that had to continue with their usual training.
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