Injury Types: Repetitive and Traumatic
In this addition of our news letter, I wanted to address two different injury types, traumatic vs repetitive. Understanding where your issue came from is vital to your rehabilitative process. This is the “root cause” conversation that has become so popular today.
Traumatic injuries are just what they sound like, something happened to you. These are then further decided down into contact and non contact injuries. Take an ACL tear, this is almost always (because nothing is 100%) a traumatic injury. But contact vs non contact dramatically changes the game. A contact tear means something like you planted your leg, someone ran into it and your ACL buckled and gave way. This is not the fault of our own body. This is an external force problem that had someone not hit you, you would be fine. A non contact tear is very different. This is when you plant your leg and your ACL gives way. This means there is a problem with your system. A clinician should then, as part of your rehab, figure out what contributing factors lead to that event and what needs to be done to address them.
Repetitive injuries are a different category. They are injuries that seem to pop up out of nowhere, often slowly but not always. People often describe it as “ I didn’t do anything,” meaning that there was no mechanism to the injury. These are often injuries that come from tissue being broken down and then not having ample time to heal before they get broken down again. This is by far the largest category of injuries. It includes everything from your golfer’s or tennis elbow to your Achilles tendinopathy to even your disc issues. These come from things like poor movement mechanics, poor programming, poor movement quality, poor posture or specific or generalized weaknesses. Rehab for issues like these should also include the question of why did this tissue fail and what can we do so it doesn’t happen again.
No one can ever guarantee that a re-injury won’t happen, we statistically know that it could. But by asking the right questions, we can guide rehab to decrease the likelihood of it happening again and build greater resilience where it is needed.
