Injury

Written By Tumo

We all either have had it, have it, or will have it. It’s inevitable for all traceurs. But what can be done to treat injuries, or even to prevent them? In this article, I will tell you what CAN be done, and what CANNOT be done to help you.

Prevention of Injuries

In short, there is nothing you can do to COMPLETELY prevent injury. Even David Belle, Cyril Rafaelli and Danny Ilabaca will suffer injuries in their training.

The best things you can do are to train yourself to your full potential (physically and mentally, strengthening/conditioning), warming up, and more importantly warming down, don’t push yourself over what you believe you can do, enjoy yourself, and relax when you’re doing parkour; don’t be overly cautious. If you relax, you are more concentrated towards your movements, but if you are too cautious, your concentration is drawn away from the movements, making you more susceptible to injury.

If you push too hard, and you go into things just on a spur of the moment, you will injure yourself. Warming up and down can prevent the pulling of muscles, and can improve your chances of not getting injured, but are not a complete prevention. Strengthening and conditioning can reduce the chances of spraining ankles, conditions such as jumpers and runners knee.Through this, and tutorials such as Dogen’s Titanium Ankles, you can learn how to land moves, on the balls of your feet. This saves you from shin splints and the like.

This is how you can stop some injuries, but there is always a chance of an injury.

Common Injuries and What to do about them

These are some common injuries:

• Scrapes, Bruises, Scratches etc
• Blood Blisters
• Swellings
• Sprains and Twisted ankles
• Shin splints
• Bruised shoulder
• Pulled Muscles

For everything, rest is suggested. A good long rest is going to do wonders for most injuries. For anything that has swelled, bruised, sprained, twisted or pulled, a technique called RICE can be used. It stands for Rest, Ice, Compress, and Elevate. Basically, you rest it, put an ice pack on it, wrap it TIGHTLY around the injury, and lift it up so the blood rushes away from it. An ice cold bath will reduce swelling as well, and cool you down (cool, geddit? NO!?! Pfft). For pulled muscles, you can also lightly stretch that area, to warm it up. For scrapes and scratches, clean out the wound, and then apply a dressing/plaster. For blood blisters, do not burst the blister, let it heal. If it happens to burst, clean it out with soap and water.

These are what are recommended for common, smaller injuries.

More problematic injuries

If you think anything is broken, or there is any doubt, go to A&E as soon as possible, there should be no second thoughts about it.

Conclusion

Fitness is paramount for the reduction in chance of injuries. If you have good form in your techniques also, you reduce the chance. On the Lincs Parkour forums, Ben has now made a section for conditioning and training, so if you have any injuries, there is the place to check for more information.