Every sport is dangerous…
Clarification… anything that you do that you are ill-prepared to do is dangerous and even if well prepared injuries are still possible.
Every sport falls into one of two categories…
1- Contact sports- This is obvious. Football, wrestling, ice hockey, rugby, lax.
2- Repetitive use sports- Doing the same thing over and over again. These are the sneaky sports that are probably more dangerous than contact sports because athletes tend to not prepare… Track / XC, baseball, softball, soccer, field hockey, fencing, golf, tennis, volleyball, basketball, gymnastics… basically all sports.
Some sports even fall into both categories.
In my opinion and in my experience, the athletes that navigate their sports careers with the most success and the least amount of injuries all have a few things in common…
1- They choose the right sport for their physiology (body type, muscle fiber make up, skill set) and mindset. Basically you are setting a kid up for failure if you push him or her into the wrong sport because you are asking them to do something un-natural to them. This is just another reason they need to be exposed to a bunch of sports when they are young… Hard work will take you pretty far but if you are in the wrong sport you will be swimming against the current. For example, Rob Kanniard just won a state championship in wrestling at 160lbs. If he had chosen football (another contact sport) he would be ok.. but wouldn’t be getting a football scholarship to a Big Ten school. He doesn’t have the physiology to be at that level in football.
2- Strength. I might be biased but I see it everyday. Athletes can mitigate much of the injury risk by being strong. There are always going to be some injuries especially in contact sports but strength is key factor. There are various forms of strength that are important:
-In contact sports, obviously maximal and explosive strength are going to set athletes up for success, but also reduce injury. If strength didn’t matter there wouldn’t be weight classes and they wouldn’t separate men and women. Strong athletes injury weak athletes.
-Strength in extreme ranges of motion. Being strong in end ranges of motion is important to mitigating injury risk because it gives you a buffer zone or a reserve zone. If you are strong at an end range of a given joint angle that means that you have the ability to take the joint to end range safely and also you can apply and absorb force at that extreme joint angle.
-High GPP levels. The athletes that seem to stay the healthiest are the ones that have a big base of General Physical Preparedness. They have a big base of fitness and general strength which allows them recover from hard training and competing and then get back at it the next day at 100%. They have strong stabilizers because they have brought up the strength in the small muscle groups. This goes a long way to prevent injuries in contact sports, but also the repetitive sports. When you are performing the same motion thousands if not millions of times in a year those muscles, tendons, and connective tissue had better be strong and conditioned to take that abuse. For example, runners shouldn’t suffer all these soft tissue and small nagging injuries at such a young age. It is simply bad preparation and no base of GPP. You can’t prepare to run by running more haha. You have to raise the strength endurance of all those muscles that are going to get pounded millions of times.
This is just my opinion after training hundreds of athletes and navigating this stuff personally as an athlete.