OUCH

Over the many years that I've played sports, I've had my fair share of injuries. For me, I noticed that I have more injuries when I play multiple sports at once, but they are less severe because my body is now conditioned to taking these types of hits and doing the same constant motion over and over. In an article written by Jaime Duffek, who graduated from Drake University and is currently the NCSA (Next College Student Athlete) Senior Head Recruiting Coach, titled "A Few Surprises in the Data Behind Single-Sport and Multi-sport Athletes" she states, “Limit overuse injuries: Overuse injuries occur when an athlete repeats the same motion over and over again. Playing multiple sports gives athletes time to heal and develop different muscle groups, tendons and ligaments.”  By this statement you can see that by playing multiple sports that require different muscle groups you not only avoid injury but you also develop more and new muscle groups to prevent future injuries and tendon/ligament damage. But for every athlete it is different, for example, for me, it took time for my body to become conditioned to the same motion while playing different sports, and once that happened, my injury rate decreased dramatically.

 Something that I find very helpful at my school, as well as many other high schools in my area, is our sports medicine staff that we have at all home games we participate in, for all sports and sometimes they even travel with us if the other school isn't providing any sports medicine. They have many different ways of not only helping on sight, but they can also cup your muscles, scrape them, or use a stem program to help stimulate before and after both practices and games. Below I have described the different methods and also attached both articles and YouTube videos to help you better understand why these methods are used and their results.

Cupping- helps relieve pain, reduce swelling, restore blood flow, and can be used as a deep tissue massage to just loosen the muscle. You can find more information in the article "Cupping Therapy" and in the video "A Look at Olympic "Cupping" and Athletes' Pain".
Scraping- helps reduce swelling and stimulate blood flow to make the muscle heal quicker on its own. You can find more information on scraping in this article, "Scrape the Pain Away-Graston Technique" or this YouTube video,  "Pro Chiropractic - Bozeman, MT - Neck Graston Technique".
Stem Therapy- helps to relieve pain, reduce swelling, and build strength by intentionally shocking your muscles. You can find more information on stem therapy in the article, "Electric Stimulation" and in the YouTube video "How Does Complex Electrostimulation Work?"

 Personally, I have had all treatments done on my body and believe that they do truly work. For the cupping I used the suction with air (rather than the heating method) and they are left on for 5 minutes then taken off. At first there is a bit of pain but it is all worth it in the end for the relief when the cup is taken off. For scraping there is a lot more pain, but it requires less times that the process has to be done and you can feel quicker results. Lastly the stem therapy is something that I actually use on a regular basis to majorly decrease any swelling that I may have right before a game or practice.


My right quad after scraping due to it having a tear mid football and soccer season.
My right quad after cupping. (Done a couple weeks after scraping).
Right IT (Iliotibial) Band after scraping because it was tight. My IT band was tight due to overuse while my quad was injured.

My friends back while in the middle of scraping. He is the quarterback for my football team , so as my quad was tight from constantly kicking, his back was extremely tight from constantly throwing.

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