Playing sports is a wonderful and exhilarating way to stay active and healthy. The competitive nature, as well as the usual teamwork, that goes along with playing sports is a way to make exercise an even more positive aspect of your life. However, it can also increase the chances of receiving injuries. Sports injuries are typically divided into two categories: acute and chronic. Acute injuries are injuries that happen suddenly while you are playing or exercising, while chronic injuries happen over time with continued use of your muscles and joints. Here’s a look at some acute and chronic injuries that can happen to your joints if you’re not careful…
Knees
Patellar tendinitis (chronic): Also known as jumper’s knee, patellar tendinitis is a condition that causes prolonged pain in your knee area. It is highly associated with frequent jumping, which will create microtears in the inferior patellar region that will add up over time. This type of activity is frequently associated with many sports such as gymnastics or basketball.
Torn ACL (acute): A torn anterior cruciate ligament is one of the most frequent injuries in the world of sports. Typically, it doesn’t have to be a contact-based injury, and it often happens to people in solo sports like gymnastics. A tear in this ligament will forever effect the structural integrity of your knee, which is why it is considered to be a serious, sometimes career ending, injury in the sports world. However, treatment is still possible and widely available.
Achilles tendon
Achilles tendinosis (chronic): Often mistaken for tendinitis, Achilles tendinosis is damage to an Achilles tendon on the cellular level. It affects the amount of repair cells that your tendon is able to produce, leading to weaker joints that can tear more easily. It happens from overuse of a particular tendon, where the micro tears are occurring faster than the body can heal them.
Ruptures (acute): The Achilles tendon is actually the most commonly injured tendon in the human body. A vast majority of these injuries occur when the tendon suffers a rupture and breaks open. The cause of this is often intense pressure from jumping or running, or else heavy impact to the ankle from a foreign force. After suffering a ruptured Achilles tendon, surgical treatment and intense rehabilitation may be required.
Shoulders
Rotator cuff tears (chronic and acute): One of the most common shoulder conditions, a torn rotator cuff occurs when one of the tendons in your shoulder is ruptured. What is interesting about this condition is that it is very frequently both a chronic or an acute injury. Severe trauma to the shoulder may be a cause for an acute rotator cuff tear, but continued use and stress on the region over time will also cause micro tears that will lead to a bigger tear, resulting in a torn rotator cuff.