Avoiding injury during ski season with Technique

Skiiing and snowboarding are very popular pastimes in the UK and, with the obvious lack of snow here, up to nearly 2mil Brits will make the journey across popular regions in France, Austria, Italy amongst many others.

As thrilling and exciting as skiing is, it is categorised as an extreme sport and therefore comes with a degree of risk and it is not a surprise that certain injuries are commonplace.

According to some sources, injury rates in skiing are close to one injury per 1,000 days skied. You don’t necessarily have to be medical to understand some of the common injuries that are seen in skiers are:

1. Anterior cruciate ligament rupture of sprain
2. Wrist and thumb injuries
3. Shoulder injuries such as rotor cuff tears, fractures and sprains
4. Medial collateral ligament injuries
5. Head injuries concussion 

There are ways that you can protect yourself from injury using certain pieces of equipment such as braces and exo-skeletons. Consultant knee surgeon and friend of the practice Simon Thompson has explained to us the importance of the correct DIN setting in skiers, an element that often gets overlooked.

However, being a sports medicine practice means we can help our clients give themselves the best chance of staying injury-free through good old hard work. 

At Technique Health and Fitness we use a system called Benchmark. This system in line with a peer-reviewed battery of tests that helps us detect deficits in strength, endurance and mobility of certain joints. It tells us if a patient is dangerously weaker on one side compared to the other or less durable.

Non-contact ACL injuries are common place amongst footballers, hockey players and basketball players. Research has leaned on the fact that when landing; if supporting muscle groups are spent/fatigued after a certain time of playing sport, then this has led the individual to land in a way typical of an ACL injury. That is exactly how I tore my ACL! 

Therefore, if I had been armed with the information that Benchmark gives us, perhaps I would have seen that I had insufficient endurance in my hips/knees and could have stabilised myself better. We hope to use this system to help people help themselves.

At THF we offer a strength and conditioning service that offers tailored exercise programs for you to at your gym/home. We believe that Physiotherapy shouldn’t just be reactive but proactive. When runners have a strength and conditioning routine alongside their specific running programs, the evidence tells us that injury risk is decreased significantly. It can be the same for skiers.