Auld Argonian asked this question in another thread, and I thought it would be worth discussing:

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Originally Posted by auld argonian

I'm sure that you can get back in shape but those heavy events look like they're the sort of thing that can cause some serious damage if you haven't trained very specifically for them. Alan, what are the most frequent chronic problems for Highland Athletes and how do you train to prevent them?

Best

AA

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I'm going to go out on a limb and classify the injuries that I've seen reported on the NASGA site as belonging to three categories...

1.) competition injuries
2.) training injuries
3.) overuse injuries
4.) lifestyle injuries, or more appropriately, " diseases"

1.) Competition or training injuries

I think the most common competition injury I see/hear about is tearing a bicep, or tearing the proximal bicep tendon when "blocking" a REALLY hard sheaf toss. You need to "block" really hard to get the sheaf to *pinnnngg* off the fork, that's a given. And of course, the harder you throw, the higher it goes. It's a recipe for potential problems. What to do about it?

Personally, I do some bicep curls in the gym. Curls are absolutely useless when it comes to throwing, all they do is give you big biceps, but biceps are not really a muscle group that pays off, when it comes to throwing. Big biceps are what lots of guys want, though, so a LOT of guys do them, like crazy. Strengthening the biceps and the biceps tendon at the head should help with being able to resist the impact force of a huge "block". Just don't go overboard with it.

I also have started throwing sheaf slightly differently, in a manner which involves "sticking the hip" more, with a slightly less hard block. Hopefully that will also help.

The second competition injury that I see crop up is sprained ankles. This usually comes from stepping in a hole on the field while running up the caber. However, honestly, in five years of throwing, I've only seen this twice.

I have never seen anybody get hurt by a weight over bar coming back down on them.

I HAVE heard of guys messing up a rotator cuff or tearing a bicep with a big weight-over-bar pull. That happened last year However, invariably these are from guys who don't really know how to do it, usually new guys. WOB should not be a huge pull from the shoulders, but rather, should involve explosively "standing up" driven by the hip flexors, quads and buttocks. Sure, there's a pulling component in the upper body, but the vast majority of the force is really applied by the hips and core, much like an weight lifting movement called a power clean.