Injury rates and Judo

As a Judo athlete the biggest threat to your success is considered by many to be injury.

Injuries affect your performance in multiple ways:

• They prevent participation
• They prevent training
• They decrease performance

So if an injury occurs, you can be prevented from participating in a competition and/or training. Not being able to compete, means you have zero percent opportunity to win, so 100% negative performance impact. Not being able to train will negatively affect your fitness and skill development (and maintenance). Injured limbs may also permanently impact strength, flexibility, etc.

There is a correlation between the amount and intensity of training and injury risk. This extends to competing also; the intensity and nature of a competition involves a high level of injury risk. As quantity and intensity of training increase, the chance of increase goes up. Well planned training schedules including variety of training and suitable rest and recuperation can decrease injury risk as quantity and intensity increases.

A further issue is the “second injury syndrome”, whereby one injury leads to another via weakness or coordination issues resulting from the original injury. Typically, when athletes return to training and competing when injury is not 100% recovered and training not carefully modified to address original injury’s impact on second injury risks.

Commonly a threshold is described where the injury rate/risk increases non-linearly. I.e. rather than your risk of injury increasing equally along with quantity of training; once you increase training quantity/intensity over a certain level the injury rate increases faster than the amount of training. This threshold is not a set point for all athletes, each individual has unique characteristics that affect injury rate. However, everyone has a threshold of training at which point the injury risk grows exponentially.

Although everyone’s threshold is different, a common level quoted is 16 hours of training per week.

So as a Judo athlete what does this mean to you in practical terms?

You need to plan your training and competition schedule carefully. An athlete at elite level for example will compete (on average) every 10 weeks. If we use the typical 8 week training cycle; you can easily plan a systematic training programme that fits nicely. Of course non-elite athletes compete at different frequency. Planning rest and recovery is essential to balance against the training and competing.

For example if you were on a one competition every 10 weeks programme, you could plan rest periods around your competitions. If attending EJU events for example it mighty be that you compete on week 0, then attend a high intensity training camp. This might be followed by a rest week; then a 6-8 week training phase, then a one week taper to the next competition.

You will note that this style of programme starts with the competition, rather than the common idea of ending at a competition. With this style of scheduling the plan starts with a high intensity, high risk competition and training camp. A rest and recover after this might be required as you can assume there is a high possibility that you may become injured during a competition and typical high intensity post-competition camp. So we plan an injury recovery/rest after the competition and camp.

As a currently non-elite athlete, you need to gradually increase training quantity and intensity over many years; sudden increases are known to greatly increase injury risk. So as well as the 6-8 week training programme needing to factor in injury risk, your long term planning needs to consider it also. Importantly, we need to prevent injuries as much as possible; because as we stated at the start of this article; injuries can prevent participation in competitions and if you can’t compete you have 0% chance of victory. Competing with an injury decreases the chance of victory also.

As ever, discussing with your coaches is advised.