What Causes Overuse Injuries?
- Lack of appropriate muscle strength or endurance
- Poor core stability
- Muscle imbalance (strong tight muscles versus weak stretched muscles)
- Inflexibility
- Malalignment or Biomechanical issues (e.g. flat foot, squinting patellae)
- Training errors
- Faulty technique
- Incorrect equipment.
By far the most common cause of overuse injury is training errors. Moreover, the most common error is "too much, too soon".
How to Prevent an Overuse Injury
We can prevent overuse syndromes. Some of the ways to prevent this injury include:
- Warm-up (including stretching) and warm-down (including stretching) before and after all exercise.
- Use proper equipment (e.g. jogging shoes for jogging, a racquet that is the right size with the proper grip size and strings strung to your level of play).
- Increase at a rate no faster than 10% increase per week (distance, speed, weight, etc).
- Practice and concentrate on correct technique.
- Condition for 2-3 weeks before starting - strength and flexibility.
- Listen to your body - pain is a warning that something is wrong. Early identification and treatment will allow you to continue your activity.
- Identify and correct the cause of pain or discomfort.
- Ensure full injury rehabilitation, e.g. a sore right leg can cause an overuse injury in the left through compensation.
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