Injury Prevention and Maintaining Quality Training

Injury Prevention and Maintaining the Quality of Training

Warming Up and Cooling Down These are crucial to the success or failure of any training schedule. Warming up properly helps to avoid injury and cooling down clears the system of the chemicals in the body produced by the exercise that can result in muscle stiffness. To warm up and cool down correctly enables the player to train more freely, more often and, as a result of this, more effectively. A warm up and cool down refers to a period of light exercise and stretching that would last for approximately ten minutes, i.e. five minutes of stretching and flexibility and five minutes of very light jogging slowing to a walk. This should be completed immediately before and after each session.

Equipment and Clothing

With any physical training it is important to use the correct equipment. This will not only prevent the possibility of injury but increase the effectiveness of the training as a whole.

Important points to remember are to always:

1. Run on grass or soft surfaces rather than on the roads.

2. Run in a pair of shoes that will support your ankles sufficiently and not in flimsy Table Tennis shoes. Joggers are ideal for longer distances whereas for sprints and shuttle runs (which should always be done on grass when possible) tennis type shoes (cross training shoes) are possibly the best.

3. Warm up in an extra layer of clothing to that in which you actually carry out the session and put this back on before you cool down or do the flexibility work. This outer layer should be something like a track suit or waterproof suit that will help you to keep warm but does not restrict movement.

An injury that bothers mostly table tennis players is "tennis elbow". "Tennis elbow" is an inflamation symptom in the elbow area at the extensors muscles of the forearm resulted in pain during the table tennis movements. There is no specific prevention of this symptom. The athlete has to do a very good warm up with stretching exercises following a specific training program given by the team orthopedist and physiotherapist. In this case (symptom) even the ice treatment for 6-8 minutes after the training session is a prevention.

The treatment of the tennis elbow is the total absence of the athlete from the training for about 2-3 weeks. During this period the athlete can follow a special training program ex. swimming, biking, weight training, physiothetapy. The physiotherapy program includes TENS, laser, ice treatment, ultrasonics and massage.