Injury Characteristics among Young Adults during and Immediately after the COVID-19 Lockdown

Abstract

The lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic inherently changed people’s lifestyles. Forty-eight days of isolation led to worsening physical fitness in addition to the development of other unhealthy habits. The aim of this study was to describe sport-related injuries in the active general population. Physical therapy centres and sports medicine clinics were contacted via e-mail, seeking patients who had sustained an injury during or immediately (up to two weeks) after the lockdown. Patients who agreed to participate completed an online survey that followed the International Olympic Committee Statement. The questionnaire focused on physical exercise habits, type of injury, location and tissue affected. A total of 51 females and 67 males (30.5, SD = 8.8 years) participated in the study. Eighty percent of the participants performed aerobic training sessions, while the rest dedicated their workouts to strength training. Two in every three injuries were located in the lower limbs, and 80% affected the musculoskeletal tissue. Of all the injuries recorded, 67% occurred during the first week after lockdown. The number of aerobic exercise sessions was positively correlated with lower limb injuries (χ2 = 17.12, p < 0.05). Exercise habits should be considered when planning to return to a sport after a period of confinement to avoid injury.

A Study on the Injury Rate of Spanish Competitive Athletes as a Consequence of the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown

“…Going deeper into the habits of athletes DL (and the sequences of these), most athletes either performed combined strength and endurance training or only strength training, leading to similar results to those found in other studies [7]. The significant decrease in the average IR of athletes who combined strength and endurance training may be because they worked on several physical capacities instead of focusing on just one, which may help the athletes to maintain their physical and physiological states for as long as possible, bearing in mind that detraining is very difficult to avoid due to the restrictive environments, where most athletes have found themselves during social isolation, and the impossibility of receiving sports-specific training stimuli [9,12,37].…”

“…The world has recently been hit by a pandemic originating from COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), which was first detected in December 2019 in Wuhan, China [1]. Different restrictive measures were taken due to this pandemic, such as movement restrictions, social distancing, and the closures of sports facilities [2][3][4][5], which led to psychosocial sequels (e.g., anxiety, depression or insomnia) [6] and a decrease in sports participation and physical fitness [2,7,8]. These measures also compromised athlete training by limiting their physical activity, hindering their access to many forms of physical exercise and multidisciplinary sports teams (e.g., coaches, sports scientists, sports medicine professionals), and hampering team practices [4,9,10].…”

“…Athletes usually trained at home DL, focusing on bodyweight-based and weightlifting strength training, as well as cardiovascular endurance conditioning [9,11,35]. However, home-exercise programs (characterized by limited equipment and facilities) do not provide enough stimuli to replicate the conditions of real competitions and usually lead to irregular training loads and a reduction in strength and general fitness levels [2,7,9,11,12,19,36,37].…”

“…Moreover, assuming that the athletes' workloads were approximately 20 to 40% of their normal workloads, the recommended time to return to top-level training without a high risk of injury would be estimated at 3-5 weeks [38], although the return was further complicated by the extreme need to return to normalcy in an extremely short time. This was the case for many elite athletes, who experienced a reduction in rest time between competitions [2,10,11,13], as well as changes in nutrition, sleep, and exercise habits [7]. This situation resulted in an increase in IR, especially musculoskeletal injuries, upon return to sports at all competitive levels, mostly in the first two weeks after the return [2,3,10,11,13,16,[39][40][41][42][43] To what extent has the IR changed after the lockdown (AL) when compared to before the lockdown (BL) in competing athletes?…”

The Impact of the SARS-COVID-19 Lockdowns on the Subjectively Perceived Performance Level of Amateur Athletes after Returning to the Gyms

“…Nevertheless, amateur athletes often start at a similar performance level to where they left off a long time ago. As many studies have shown, this can lead to a higher loss of performance and injury rates [ 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 ].…”