Combat Athletes & Sports Health

Most often, muscle strain type injuries can be grouped in with all the other hugely annoying but otherwise non-threatening injuries that keep you from training at full capacity. As with all of these annoying injuries, it is key to treat it immediately to minimize its impact on your training. At the same time, it is equally important to recognize potentially more serious injuries that mask themselves as muscle sprains.

Background:

Muscle injuries are typically classed into three or four classes, depending on the extent of the muscle damage. Grade 1 is the least severe, merely consisting of a few damaged muscle fibers, while a Grade 3/4 injury is a complete rupture of the muscle and supporting tissue. Additionally, acute and chronic injuries are distinguished.

Causes of Muscle Strains:

As you can imagine, a multitude of causes can lead to acute muscle injury, but most commonly they can be traced back to a sudden, forceful extension of muscle fibers that surpasses their tolerance level. Particularly sudden stops of accelerating body parts and unexpected changes in muscle contraction can cause muscle strains (punching an object or pulling an opponent when encountering sudden resistance for example). Another frequent cause are muscle contusions due to heavy impact (getting kicked in the thigh for example).

Of course, you can also develop chronic type muscle pains due to long-lasting overuse. This type of injury should best be assessed and treated my professionals.

Risk Factors:

Individuals whose muscles are not “activity-adapted” are at an elevated risk of straining a muscle. In this case, “activity-adapted” means being in good athletic shape, having warmed up sufficiently prior to exercising and training in a climate controlled environment (cold temperatures are worse for injury risk). As with all contact sports, Combat Athletes are a more prone to strain muscles when compared to non-contact sports.

Recognizing Muscle Injuries:

Depending on the severity of the injury, you may experience these admittedly not very specific symptoms:

• obviously pain, particularly when using the injured muscle.
• swelling and bruising
• potentially impaired muscle function

As you can see, it is easy to confuse any number of injuries for muscle injuries (or vice versa), but in most cases it does not matter. If the injury is bad enough to inhibit motion altogether or you can see deformities, you will have to get professional help anyways, if you suffered only a low grade injury with the above symptoms, treatment is the same regardless of the actual diagnosis.

Treatment:

If you experience the above symptoms after suffering an injury, it is key to start treatment immediately. Your first priority should be to prevent as much bruising and swelling as possible by once again (big surprise!) using (R.)I.C.E. This is your best shot at minimizing recovery time. Once that time window has closed, no amount of ice, NSAIDs or other measure can substitute for that initial treatment. To make sure your acute muscle injury does not turn into one of those permanently nagging little pains that lots of athletes have and which prevent them from training at full capacity, your next step is pretty simple. Be smart and allow your muscles to fully recover by giving them the appropriate amount of rest. Muscle injuries take a minimum of three weeks, but depending on their severity can take up to thirteen weeks to properly heal.

Bottom Line:

Generally, minor muscle injuries can be easily treated with our basic tools, ice, rest and common sense. At the same time it is important to recognize more severe muscle injuries and to consult professionals (ideally a combination of sports physician/orthopedic surgeon and physical therapist).

Sources:

Scharf H.-P. Orthopädie und Unfallchirurgie (Orthopedics and Trauma Surgery). Munich, Germany, 2009.

Mayoclinic.com

Medline