Is Covid-19 Causing an Epidemic of Sports Injuries?
Is it just me or are other people seeing an increase in sports injuries since the Covid-19 epidemic struck a year ago? It seems as if, every week, there is more than one article in the sports media describing a heartbreaking announcement of another professional athlete whose season is shortened or ended by a serious injury.
The first question any rigorous thinker would ask is whether this number is higher than normal. The simple reality is that serious injuries are, sadly, commonplace in many sports. There is no way tell at present whether this outbreak of injuries is a statistical anomaly (meaning it’s due to random variation in injury patterns that occurs over time), a trend that can only be identified with several years of data that may have a specific cause, or, as I and several experts opine, has been caused by the physical and psychological impact of the Covid-19 pandemic athletes at all levels of sport as an additive factor to the already significant demands placed on their minds and bodies by sports participation.
To be sure, this article is based, to some extent, on speculation and conjecture. Yet, it is important to do a deep dive as early as possible when apparent patterns emerge as a means of getting out ahead of the potential causes and looking for solutions for the future. In either case, this exploration can be instructive for athletes, coaches, and sports medicine professionals to more fully understand how to better prepare athletes for optimal performance and to reduce injuries in the future.
Physical Contributors to Higher Rates of Injury Due to Covid-19
To explore the physical aspects of this year’s pattern of injuries, I’ve reached out to Dr. Greg Rhodes, an exercise physiologist based in Bend, OR, and Dr. Benjamin Costa, a physical therapist based near Truckee, CA, both of whom have extensive experience working with elite athletes.
Here’s what Dr. Rhodes had to say:
Once they got back to training, they may have jumped into conditioning that would be normal for the calendar month they were in, but not where they actually were physically (too much too early).
Training on their own and not with coach guidance, thus resulting in suboptimal training programs and less effective conditionings.
Limited in-sport training during the summer/fall might have led to a decrease in base endurance for athletes as well as less strength and overall fitness. In-sport training allows athletes to build sport-specific fitness and allow their bodies to prepare for sport-specific movements and demands that is really difficult to gain from weight-room training sessions.
Here’s what Dr. Costa had to say:
I would say the number-one cause for injuries sustained during Covid-19 is from inadequate year-round training including less total time to train, insufficient proper loading on the muscles, tendons, and bones due to restrictions around training COVID-19 placed upon athletes, coaches, and gyms.
Psychological Contributors to Higher Rates of Injury Due to Covid-19
As for what mental and emotional factors may have contributed to the injuries among athletes at all levels of sport, I have a few ideas:
Very few people fully appreciate the toll that Covid-19 has taken on all of us physically and psychologically. Over the past ten months, the pandemic has put us in a low-grade and persistent state of stress, creating in us uncertainty, hyper vigilance, anxiety, worry, and doubt. When you add in the high levels of investment that committed athletes have in their sport and the uncertainty it has presented to them, the volume on these stressors has been turned up even more.
This uncertainty in both training opportunities and the possibility of having no competitive season may have reduced the motivation to train early in Covid-19 (I heard this consistently from the athletes I work with). This ambiguity for the future could also have caused athletes to soften their goals and let up just a bit on their drive and determination, all of which would result in a lower level of fitness entering the competitive season.
The reduced preparation, both in terms of conditioning and in-sport training, would naturally hurt confidence in how ready athletes were for their competitive seasons. In turn, this lowered confidence could also reduce, even slightly, the commitment that athletes make to their sports performances, placing them in less stable positions and, as a result, make them more susceptible to injury.
The ongoing stress caused by the pandemic created anxiety and bodily tension which could have created feelings of physical discomfort (“I just haven’t felt quite right since Covid-19 struck,” said one Olympic athletes to me) and muscle bracing (a natural evolutionary response to stress that worked on the Serengeti 250,000 years ago to help our ancestors survive but increases injury risk among athletes in 2021).
Focus has been another victim of Covid-19. When under stress, our focus tends to either narrow excessively (don’t look up) or become distracted (with interfering thoughts or feelings, or irrelevant outside cues). The pandemic has certainly caused us to have to shift our focus constantly to the myriad daily news, threats, guidelines, orders, and worries that were ever-present in and often overwhelming our attentional field. It has also pulled our focus away other important parts of our lives, in the case of athletes, less attention on being prepared and less focused on their training or competitive surroundings. Clearly, attention directed toward Covid-19 has meant less focus on preparation. Plus, as we can all see, less focus while training and competitions means athletes would be at greater risk of injury.
One thing that we have all experienced during the pandemic has been more negative emotions more often than usual. For all of us, frustration, anger, disappointment, sadness, depression, and even periodic feelings of despair are normal and expected, yet problematic, reactions to Covid-19. These unhealthy emotions could be impacting all of the other mental areas I just described as well as altering many aspects of athletes’ physiology, all to their detriment and all putting them at increased risk of injury.
Another less noticeable effect of Covid-19 has been an increase in isolation and loneliness. When it comes to sports, it takes a village to support, train, and prepare athletes for competition. The pandemic caused athletes to have to separate themselves from family, friends, teammates, coaches, trainers, and other members of their team. This detachment alone can create many of the physical and psychological experiences that can lead to a higher vulnerability to injury.
One last point that Dr. Rhodes suggested was that, with Covid-19 setting back their training and preparation, and, for Olympic aspirants, the Beijing and Tokyo Olympics approaching, hope-to-be Olympians may be concerned about qualifying for their respective Olympic teams. As a result, they may have been feeling the need to push their limits a bit further than normal and a bit too far for their bodies to be able to support given the already extreme demands of their sport and the already stunted preparation caused by Covid-19. This boundary pushing, combined with all of the unhealthy physical and psychological changes that may have been caused by the pandemic that I’ve described above, could have placed these athletes’ bodies in situations that they simply weren’t capable of handling safely.
My thanks to Drs. Rhodes and Costa for sharing their expertise in this article. I believe that the ideas I have shared can be of great benefit to athletes, coaches, and programs at all levels of sport. The issues I explored are relevant to potentially reducing injury among younger athletes as well. They may also prove helpful to everyone in the sports community to be more aware of and react appropriately to the many physical and psychological challenges that Covid-19 has confronted us with.
Want to make mental training a part of your sports training and competitive plan? Here are a few options:
