Suffering a training injury can really disrupt your health and fitness workouts. For those involved in sports in the UAE it can seem so much worse because the nature of the sports injury can mean your training is limited for a long time.

A professional rehabilitation personal trainer in Abu Dhabi or Dubai can help you get back to fitness in less time and without further injury.

What do I do if I have suffered a sports related injury?

Question: For many sports people an injury can disrupt their training regimes and worse can have effect on their performance. For someone who has recently suffered an injury what would be your initial advice about training and exercise?

When we talk about injury we need to understand the type of injury (severity) and how it took place.

That would be my first assessment, second depending of the type of injury and location, did the client had medical intervention or not (including physiotherapy), if yes, all the medical information should be shared to better understand the situation, third take action according to the needs of the client.

Initial advice is avoiding any movement that cause pain and work with someone that can help you.

The main causes of injury

Question: From your experience as a rehab personal trainer in Abu Dhabi what would you say are the main causes for injury?

Generally, sports injury in the UAE can be divided into:

Overuse injuries

Blunt trauma

Fractures and dislocations

Acute soft-tissue sprains

Overuse

Overuse is one of the most common causes of athletic injury and is the cumulative effect of excessive, repetitive stress on anatomic structures.

It results in trauma to muscles, tendons, cartilage, ligaments, bursae, fascia, and bone in any combination.

Risk of overuse injury depends on complex interactions between individual and extrinsic factors.

Individual factors include

Muscle weakness and inflexibility

Joint laxity

Previous injury

Bone malalignment

Limb asymmetries

Extrinsic factors include Training errors (eg, exercise without sufficient recovery time, excess load, building one group of muscles without training the opposing group, and extensive use of the same movement patterns)

Environmental conditions (eg, excessive running on banked tracks or crowned roads—which stresses the limbs asymmetrically)

Training equipment characteristics (eg, unusual or unaccustomed motions, such as those made while on an elliptical trainer)

Runners most often sustain injury after too rapidly increasing their intensity or length of workouts.

Swimmers may be least prone to overuse injuries because buoyancy has protective effects, although they still are at risk, particularly in the shoulders, from which most movement occurs.

Blunt athletic trauma can result in injuries such as soft-tissue contusions, concussions, and fractures.

The mechanism of injury usually involves high-impact collisions with other athletes or objects (eg, being tackled in football or checked into the sideboards in hockey), falls, and direct blows (eg, in boxing or the martial arts).

Sprains are injuries to ligaments, and strains are injuries to muscles. They typically occur with sudden, forceful exertion, most commonly during running, particularly with sudden changes of direction (eg, dodging and avoiding competitors in football).

Such injuries also are common in strength training, when a person quickly drops or yanks at the load rather than moving slowly and smoothly with constant controlled tension.

It takes time to fully recover from an injury

Question: Rehab training is a specialist area and it often takes time for the person to completely recover from an injury. How do you deal with clients who are often frustrated at the time it can take to recover fully?

Well the first thing is pretty much embrace the fact you have an injury because there’s nothing you can do, second change the focus, Focus on what you can do, now or in the future, and it will help you stay optimistic.

Set progressive goals according to what you can do at the time being and accomplish them.

The point is to always have a plan. Then, have a backup plan, just in case the original plan fails to pan out.

This is an excellent suggestion to help cut down on the frustration that would naturally ensue when you can’t do what you intend to and feel completely out of sorts because of it.

When you have more than one plan, you have options. You don’t feel so powerless over events. This helps increase your sense of self-confidence at the same time as it reduces your level of frustration.

A personal trainer in the UAE with sports injury rehab experience can help you plan and execute the best ways to get you back to physical fitness.

PT Training plans for injury recovery

Question: For basic injuries sustained either during training or sports activities what examples of training plans can you provide?

I follow a general rule when it comes to injury in the training programs.

Movement

This is the foundation which represents our ability to move well without limitations and with balance. This encompasses our fundamental movement patterns.

These patterns include being well balanced, having static and dynamic stability, showing full range of motion, good movement control and body awareness, and good posture.

Performance

This is the ability to sustain quality of movement and repeated work without fatigue. This can be defined as gross athleticism which looks at measurable factors in movement, such as strength, power, and endurance.

Skill

This is the sport specific skill which looks at how well you perform your particular sport skill, such as a perfecting the forehand, kicking a football, or even striking controlled punches.

This also looks at the competition statistics and any specific testing relative to that sport.

Tips to prevent injuries

Question: Are there any tips you can give to help prevent injuries in the first place – warming up exercises for example?

In injuries prevention there’s nothing like a good warm up, that most of the times is widely neglected, for that I use a RAMP protocol.

Raise body temperature & heart rate – Various locomotor patterns, Jog, skip, shuffle, low intensity technical work (depending on the activity)

Activate key muscle groups – (Once again depending on the activity) Glute bridges, mini band sidewalks, Body weight squats, Body Weight Lunges.

Mobilize joints – Shoulder Dislocations rubber band, Full Lunge/Spiderman, Hip Rolls, Lunge with trunk rotation.

Potentiate – prime the body for the maximal intensities it will be required to produce in the session/comp