Is My Sport Going To Cause My Retirement?

First off this article isn’t meant to scare you. It is simply meant to prepare you for the likelihood that you might experience involuntary retirement due to injury. No sport is safe from injury and in each one, there is an injury that is worse than the others. It should also be mentioned that this information comes from a source that focus on youth females in sport.

What the researchers found was that the type of sport was a bigger predictor for injury incidence rate than age group, competitive level, type of competition. Not to say that these are not important but type of sport is a bigger predictor. It was shown in this literature review that the pooled injury incidence rate of track and field was less than that of collision based.

The next important piece of information that they found was that after type of sport, the next biggest predictor was level of competition. I believe the findings here are easier to predict. Elite athletes experienced more injuries than amateurs or non-competitive athletes.

This short article is just here to warn you that even though you are competing at high levels. It is important to rest and take of your body after small injuries so that they do not become bigger injuries and force you to retire from sport. While even though the average amount of lost days due to injury was only 10. This could become worse if we don’t take care of ourselves. To read more about this topic please look at the literature below.

Literature: Beech, J., Jones, B., Hughes, T., & Emmonds, S. (2024). Injury profile in youth female athletes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports medicine, 1-24.