Mindfulness for Preventing Sports Injuries

This article is primarily discussing the prevention of sudden injuries (which the word ‘injury’ is taken to mean in the context of this article), as opposed to medium and long-term injuries (e.g. repetitive strain). This is based on my personal experience in training and teaching Parkour.

Despite the perceptions that the media pushes, Parkour (when trained properly) has a relatively low rate of injuries in comparison to a lot of sports (particularly competitive sports).

One of the reasons this is the case is because Parkour is widely practised as a non-competitive sport (or ‘discipline’, since ‘sport’ in Australia is by definition competitive).

This means that if someone else does a jump, even if you think they’re not as good as you, you feel no self-obligation to do that same jump. It is completely up to you as to whether you have set that particular jump as a personal goal, and if you haven’t and don’t want to do the jump then most practitioners won’t be affected by who else does the jump.

When I discovered this about Parkour it was a breath of fresh air from all the expectations and pressures that are pushed onto you in other sports.
And not surprisingly, this is a prime reason for our low injury rates.

Parkour also has a strong culture of longevity, which also contributes to the low injury rates.

However this of course doesn’t mean there are no injuries.

I have had a couple of injuries in my 10 years of practising Parkour.
No broken bones thankfully, but I have hit my head once, and dislocated a couple of fingers.

A ‘Silly’ Injury

I went to one of my favourite training locations — Garden City one Sunday morning to do a normal weekly training session. There were a few others there at 10am when I got there and I started warming up. I had a particular goal that day — to improve the distance I could get off my cat-pass. “Today”, I thought, “I’m going to do a lot of cat-passes”.

I felt fairly good, it was a fresh morning and I wanted to get straight into it. After my quick warm up I started drilling some cat-passes. After about the 3rd or 4th I started going faster, and on around the 7th I ran up, my footwork was out of line by a touch, I took off too close to the pillar and banged my thigh just above my front knee as I went over. I went straight into a dive roll, it must’ve looked sloppy but it saved me from getting any further injuries.
I felt fine, got up and started walking… ouch! My thigh was bruised, the swelling was minimal but it hurt to do anything more than walk slowly. Damn! I just travelled 45mins to get here, after 10 minutes of training I had another 45mins home. I was quite annoyed at myself.

I got home and chilled out for the rest of the day and thought a bit about the injury, I knew it wasn’t too bad and would heal in a couple of days, but it could’ve been worse.
“I went too hard too soon” I decided, it seemed like the obvious reason.
“I did 7 really fast run ups, I was unlucky and I shouldn’t have gone so hard.”
I felt relieved that I knew the answer and I moved on with life.

Blame

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I was practising cat-passes on another day that I thought about the injury again. On this particular day I managed to do up to 20 fast-paced cat-passes without even a hesitation. I thought about how I felt this day, I felt really good, I could feel there was less hesitation in my run up and I was more relaxed.

This brought a number of questions to the front of mind about the day I got the injury:
- Was I tired from the Saturday night before?
- Did I feel good, or just ok?
- Had I done a lot of leg work that week?
- Was I hesitant about pedestrians walking past?
- Did I put too much pressure on myself to practice that move today, and did I not listen to my body enough?

These questions I could not answer, simply because I didn’t think about these factors at the time. In fact, I stopped thinking about any possible factors after I decided that I just went too hard. And now, I felt like going too hard wasn’t the only factor, because I had just proven that I could go harder today! (Just to clarify, you absolutely CAN train too hard based on my body state and I probably did on that day, but in this particular case I believe it was not the ONLY contributing factor.) I ‘blamed’ my injury on this single factor alone, and after blame it’s common to become blind to other possibilities. The first key takeaway is not to blame — not yourself, not the factors and not anyone else.

Blame prevents you from learning because it means we don’t have to think about it anymore, we brush it off. It can also be used to pass the buck and avoid accountability — if I blame the slippery rail I don’t have to deal with the fact that it was my responsibility to check it beforehand.

And furthermore — what if I had a ‘near-miss’, and all the hidden contributing factors worked together but I narrowly missed hitting my leg — I probably would’ve blamed going too hard, and then kept going at a slightly lower pace, and likely injured myself later on anyway! I see a lot of people act like this in training, decide the reason why they had a near-miss and then keep training only later to injure themselves anyway. I’ve also seen the opposite — people blame ‘going too hard’ and are afraid of training that hard again. The truth is there are likely to be a number of factors contributing to an individual injury, and we can’t possibly work them all out in hindsight. Mark Twain once eloquently said ‘We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again — and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.’

The truth is, I was training too hard, and there was probably a whole bunch of warning signs that I missed that day — such as being too tired, or the pedestrians were affecting my concentration, and probably 5+ more factors that eluded me. But it just feels so difficult to realise this when all you want to do is concentrate on training and improving!

Prevention

And if that is the case, and there are so many hidden factors that contribute to a sudden injury how on earth do we prevent this type of injury?
The answer is mindfulness. Know that there are ALWAYS factors present, and there will always be factors that you are not aware of. You should try to seek out these factors, to constantly question the possibilities -
- Am I tired?
- Am I training too hard for my current state?
- Which warning signs am I currently ignoring, and are they important?
- Am I being driven by an agenda I set before today, and how will that affect my training?
- How am I feeling? Am I stressed from a week of work, am I excited to try a new jump, will this alter my perception of reality and make me do something I wouldn’t otherwise do and maybe shouldn’t be doing?
- Have I had any near misses today that I just brushed off as an accident. Do I even understand why I just had a near miss? If not maybe take a step back and assess your situation
- Have I checked my landing surface properly?
- Are the people around me influencing how I train, are THEY training dangerously?

Yes this does sound a little paranoid, but that’s a good thing.
Asking yourself these questions regularly, and by being more mindful of your self and your environment will reduce your chance of injury.

One explanation for why these injuries can happen when you have had a very focussed training session or practising moves that you are very comfortable with is inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness is the failure to recognise something that is in clear view. This tends to happen when someone is focussed on a particular task, or when following an ingrained habit. And this is where the mindfulness tools described above may become ineffective. However the solution I propose is to make the above questions and scepticism a habit itself, thereby becoming a core part of the activity you are focussing on. For example, every time I go to do a precision, even one I’ve done a thousand times before, I habitually clean the soles of my shoes to ensure they haven’t picked up enough dirt and lose grip. By continually reminding myself to do this, it has become a habit and I don’t even realise I do this any more.

Mistakes Happen

And even if you do all this and you are mindful, mistakes sometimes do happen, and usually they happen from a number of contributing factors.
So the best thing you can do is address your injury, clean yourself up, get an ice pack and stop training. Everyone makes mistakes, no matter how good you are; so instead of looking to blame take accountability for your injury and ask yourself if you were sceptical enough about how you were training today, and in future try be more mindful of the internal and external forces shaping your perspective and training.

My good friend Evie succinctly describes how her injury changed her perspective

“Since breaking my leg, I’ve stopped asking ‘how did you do that?’, and instead ‘how did that happen?’”.

Safe Training!