Girls and high school sports. More girls are participating in high school sports. It’s a great thing, but it also means there are more girls suffering from overuse injuries.
Stress your joints, muscles and connective tissues
Overuse injuries are what happens when you stress your joints, muscles and connective tissues and bones and don’t give them enough time to recover. They are common in athletes because they practice the same moves again and again. A recent study of girls participating in track and field and field hockey between 2006 and 2012 showed that girls have higher rates of overuse injuries than boys.
Average rate of overuse injury
The study found that the average rate of overuse injury for all high school students was 1.5 per 10,000 athletes participating in 1 event (practice or competition), girls had a rate of 3.82 in track and field and 2.93 in field hockey per 10,000. Quite a big difference. There were some other interesting findings in the study too. One of those is that overuse injuries were more likely to happen in practice, especially for girls who participate in field hockey and lacrosse.
Another interesting find was that as girls aged through school their injury rates decreased, while boys increased during the same time period. The most common body areas injured were the lower leg (21.8%), followed by knee (15.9%), shoulder (11.5%), and foot (11.3%).
Another interesting finding was that kids who only played one sport were more likely to suffer from overuse injuries. That’s because they are doing the same repetitive movements.
Specific measures
The important part of this is that the study and its findings can be a huge help in developing measures specific to each individual sport to prevent the overuse injuries. Knowing that girls are bigger sufferers also means that they can be made more specific to adolescent girls as well.
