HI, im 16 now and i play football. i get injured alot and it is not from contact. I have hurt my lower back my quad and hamstring in the span of three months. nothing too serious but enough to stop at least two or three days at a time. It is not like i am weak or anything compared to my peers at my position(wr). I wiegh 140 im 5-7 and i bench 150 and squat approximatley 235 but i have a very muscular build. I also have a really good diet compared to my peers. I stretch as well. My running form also seems to be ok.Is there any explanation for this.
What a coincidence…I’m thinking the same thing. I’m 16 too and I have been injured a lot, too. One thing you should do is go to a GOOD chiropractor or someone who can evaluate your posture and stuff like that. I have some biomechanic problems that could be causing my injuries, but either way I need to get them fixed up.
You’re extremely lucky to only have had to stop for 2 or 3 days. DON’T IGNORE YOUR BODY!!!
Very soon it might be 3 days that turns to 7 days, then 1 week, then 2 weeks, then 4 weeks…
Learn from my mistake: About 8 weeks ago I trained through something that I thought was soreness-EVEN THOUGH I HAD A FEELING THAT IT WASN’T!!! So after I FINALLY decided that I shouldn’t train through it, I could tell that it was a problem. However, I figured that it would be a couple days, a week at most before the problem went away. Well, that turned to days, weeks, and now today it has been 8 weeks and three days and I am losing sanity.
So, get your biomechanics checked and if you have a feeling that something isn’t good, DON’T DO IT!
Could be your warm-up session isn’t adequate enough, and/or you may have a muscular strength imbalance… Be a little more specific like with what happens and stuff like that…
WRcortese is right, you need to be a little more specific with your injuries and describe how you feel. It can also be improper lifting techniques that may be causing your lower back problems; try using a good belt and a spotter if you can. In the meantime, take care of the problems and I would seriously consider following sprint’s advice and seek a good chiro, more specifically a Sports Chiropractic Physician. Alot of Chiro’s out there claim they can treat athletic injuries when most are really not qualified, or as qualified…seek the right people and you shall receive right treatment.
Your condition of being very built up in muscles and getting injuries like yours indicates the whole leg and pelvic structure all the way to the bones, and the abdomen and psoas-illiacus as well as back, are still too bunched up in the fascial element of the muscle system. Then you get tears and inflammation when you go just a little bit further, and you get one area of the body structure holding other areas tight (like your back), so the other areas become the victim of the first areas’ tightness.
In my 22 years of professional bodywork, I’ve always seen lower back problems caused by tight legs, pelvis and abdomens. Your stretching is a great thing and you are obviously very committed to staying healthy. I think you just need some more guidance in an area not well known: lengthening the fascia - enormously.
We need to stretch so the bellies of the muscles lengthen in a long line from one end of the legs to another…not just to have the joints a little limber.
The problem with bunching up the fascia is that it gets more and more bunched up over time, and unless we notice a lack of flexibility and power, or get an injury, we aren’t aware that it is getting shorter and shorter as the days and workouts or running go on.
This build-up of accumulated shortening in the putty element of the muscles just isn’t reversible with rest or just whirlpool or surface massage. It needs to be pulled back out systematically by going round and round from one area to the next and back again for a while in each session. As the stretching of the fascia goes on, it starts to give way little by little in different areas and each area that gets longer enables other areas to relengthen a little more because there is less pull from each element of the interconnected system.
What you’d be trying to do is pull millions of tiny, gelatinous fibes called collagen to spread through the fluid of the fascia. And the fascia goes from right under your skin to the surface of the bones. You can imagine silly putty. And if you pull in an interconnected way instead of just a local way, you can get more to give way to be longer. And it’s also a lot safer than tugging hard in only one place of shortness that is being held tight by a number of other places of shortness. The fascia is known to be a giant body-shaped suit that holds everything together in our structure.
I’d suggest more stretching for more areas of your system, including the outside of the thighs and legs, the adductors as well as hamstrings, the pelvis all around, and the abdomen and sides upwards. Get your structure very warmed up BEFORE you do a lot of the stretching, as the warmth will bring more blood to the muscles and help the fascia get a little softer. A hot bath or shower or hot tub can help.
We often stretch before working out, but to really reverse the tightness we build up in running or weight lifting, we need to reverse the buildup of the shortness in the interconnected muscle system. You can do a whole long stretching session itself day after day.
One more thing, in massage they often do PNF stretching which helps the nerve activity to the muscles let go. This is a very helpful method. It works even better when the fascial envelopes of the muscles, which hold the muscle fibers (connected to the nerves) into a fixed, at rest length, are themselves lengthened with a mind-into-body focused interconnected lengthening as I have been encouraging.
This fascial envelope length of each muscle belly gets very short on most people and then the muscle fibers themselves are thus held in a shorter form, and the whole tendon-muscle body-tendon length between the bones is thus short. This not only sets up the condition for a tightness caused injury but the PNF and other neuro-muscular stretching methods are limited in their effectiveness because the muscle fibers can only go back to the length of the shortened muscle body in the fascia. (See Fixing Accumulated Shortness article referenced below.) Make the fascial lengths longer and then the neuro-muscular stretching will always take the muscle fiber lengths back toward their designed full length. It’s like making a wrapping around an accordian bigger so the accordian can relengthen back to its full open potential.
To read testimonials for this type of fascial connective tissue, structural stretching, you can look at the stretching video explanation on my website. You can apply this approach to all the stretching you do (see stretching tips indicated below).
So you can try on my site a lot of free in-depth articles about fascial re-lengthening. http://www.backfixbodywork.com
See home page right side menu, down a bit are testimonial lists and the next three articles may help you learn about this: sports medicine, performance improvement and for you especially, fixing accumulated shortness, which even describes the fascial-muscle anatomy and the different kinds of tightness caused pain. The descriptive testimonials from Olympic athletes and coaches are also helpful. Just above the testimonial list is the Free Articles page link. See stretching tips and improving yoga near the top, and at the bottom, differences from massage and how it helps chiropractic. In the middle are a lot of other interesting articles. Just above the Free Artcles page link on the home page menu is a link to info about a book about fixing backs. The brief narrative on that info page may be helpful for you as will the Intro article available.