You must practice parkour in the safest way possible, even though it is a very active sport that requires a lot of movements that can be potentially dangerous to some people. However, injuries still happen because of accidents while doing parkour, regardless of your experience and expertise in the sport. Hence, it is important to learn the best ways to address parkour injuries, such as treating and preventing them from happening again.
Always remember that parkour injuries are preventable even though they are inevitable. Remember that you must start small, move up piece by piece, and always calculate your force. Warming up can also help you prevent injuries. Lastly, be careful because prevention is always better than cure.
This article tells you everything you should know about the different parkour injuries you might sustain from doing the sport and the various ways on how to treat them as soon as possible. This article will also talk about everything you should know on preventing these parkour injuries and accidents from happening again.
The Most Common Parkour Accidents and Injuries
Some of the most common injuries that most traceurs sustain while practicing the discipline include bruises on feet and hands, hits on the shins, knee capitations, knee sprains, ankle sprains, shoulder and hip bruises coming from the rolls, and rips on the hands due to the hands sustaining all the weight and friction when moving from one place to another.
57% of the injuries sustained by traceurs of different experience ranges are due to these injuries, which also include strains, abrasion, lacerations, and fractures, according to the Scientific Journal. These usually happen when we hit barriers and obstacles as we move, which is totally inevitable, especially for parkour athletes and enthusiasts.
Understandably, many people sustain injuries from parkour because it is slowly becoming a popular sport these days, thanks to widespread representation in media such as in James Bond films, where Sebastien Foucan, one of the parkour’s forerunners in the United Kingdom, even appeared in Casino Royale.
If you know how to use your body properly, you might sustain fewer injuries than before. However, these injuries, even though they are inevitable, are still avoidable at some point. All of us have to be injured at some point, but with proper handling and treatment, we can lessen the intensity of the injuries so that they can heal much faster.
Hand and Foot Bruises: Common Injuries For All Traceurs
We use our hands and feet when we make parkour moves, inevitably getting injured on these body parts. These are the most used body parts when we make moves from parkour, and due to several factors, such as pressure and force, we can get bruises on our hands and feet.
These bruises happen when you have too much of an impact when you try executing those parkour moves. These can also happen when you are using an improper form or you have not enough conditioning in your body to prepare yourself for taking the impact.
Unfortunately, these bruises take longer to heal because even though you have bruises, you still have to use your hands and feet in parkour, so they do not get enough healing period than other parts of your body.
However, these should never stop us from doing parkour. Even though they usually take longer to heal, these are still considered minor injuries. Still, we can treat them properly whenever we experience these bruises on our hands and feet. Thus, you are doing fine as long as you do not feel swelling on your injured parts.
Usually, putting ice over the bruises helps tone down the swelling the moment you get them. You should never put warm compress over it, and always wrap the ice on some cloth or put them in an ice bag to avoid rupturing your capillaries in the process.
To avoid these from happening again, always calculate the strength you are using to not put too much pressure on your hands and feet when you move. It would also be very helpful to learn the proper ways of vaulting and landing to not place strength in the wrong places.
You also have to ensure that you have evenly distributed the force throughout your body, and you can always start small. There is no need to rush into bigger moves, especially if you are still a newbie in the discipline.
Always build up gradually and never abruptly, because you might sustain more injuries if you do that. It is also important because you are allowing your hands and feet to buy time in building up. Lastly, you can also check on barefoot training and conditioning. Even though these are not actually required, knowing these can help you sustain fewer bruises in the long run.
Ankle Strains and Sprains: When You Land Wrongly
These happen most of the time when you land on the wrong foot, and they happen to twist or roll, forcing the ankle joint out of its natural place in your feet. This can be very painful, depending on the intensity of the fall.
When this happens, your ligaments often get stretched or torn down. You will most likely strain or sprain your ligaments found on the outside of your foot, making it much more painful for you to do stunts and moves for parkour.
When you get ankle sprains and strains, you must take a long break from doing parkour and focus on your total recovery. If left untreated, it would be much more painful and end up giving you more harm than good. It might even give your parkour training a screeching halt and stop and risk not being able to do it again.
Most of these ankle strains and sprains happen when you do not land properly or kick off the walls when you move. It also happens as a result of vaulting with a bad form. Your foot happens to touch the ground or the barriers and obstacles in the wrong positions.
It can also happen when you land on uneven surfaces, such as tilted obstacles or unstable ground. When this happens, your foot rolls out or twists out of its natural position, which can be extremely painful in several instances.
The shoes you wear during your parkour practice are also a culprit behind your ankle sprains and strains, as they could not support your weight and the force of your landing as properly as possible.
Ankle sprains can be treated with a tight bandage wrapped around the injured ankle. This will help you control the swelling, but the bandage should never be too tight. When you rest, elevate your ankle by putting a bunch of pillows under your ankle. Place your ankle there when you lounge on your sofa or lay on the bed.
Lastly, it would also help to put some ice on your swollen ankle every five to seven minutes. Do not put the ice too long or you might rupture some blood vessels, which can lead to more bruising.
Preventing ankle sprains and strains is very much doable, and it does not require you to enroll in any special classes just to prevent those from happening to you. First of all, you should always master the right parkour landing techniques. This will allow you to land properly on your feet, and in the right position, of course.
Also, always remember to improve the state of balance and also the stability of your ankle joints. That way, you can prevent your ankles from rolling out or twisting out of their natural positions, reducing instances of nasty ankle sprains and strains.
When you land, keep your ankle active by activating your calves, thigh, and core muscles. This will allow you to absorb the landing force via your legs and core, rather than simply your ankle joint when you land.
It is also important to strengthen the muscles on your legs so that they can be balanced when you vault, run, and jump. Lastly, always wear the proper pair of shoes with thick soles so that they can support your every move without injuring your ankles, causing strains and sprains.
Shin Hits: Crash Landing on Obstacles
The softness of muscles, tendons, and bone tissue around the tibia causes shin strikes. Overburdening your leg muscles, tendons, or shin bone is the most common cause of shin splints.
Excessive usage of the shin muscles due to excessive exercise or increased training is the most common cause of this ailment. The action is usually a high-impact, repeated workout of your lower legs. This is one of the most serious parkour injuries that traceurs are prone to.
Dancers and runners are prone to these ailments. Shin hits may be repaired by resting your body. To relieve swelling or pain, apply ice to your shin. Do it every day for 20-30 minutes. Use insoles in your shoes and pain relievers as needed. When performing precise leaps, keep your knees close together and smooth.
Muscle Strain: When Your Muscles Are Too Tired
This type of parkour injury is never caused by things going wrong while parkouring. It’s a unique type of parkour injury and one of the most common. But it does happen, and in extreme cases, it may take you out of practice for a few days or perhaps a few weeks.
Overloading high-intensity parkour training causes muscle strains, especially if you are not yet prepared enough for it. In the excitement of starting up with parkour, it’s easy for a newcomer to overdo it.
Parkour is enjoyable, especially when you’re progressing, and as a result, it may be incredibly addictive. Your muscles do not have the potential for high-intensity parkour exercise when you initially start out.
Another reason is that you do not take adequate breaks between parkour training sessions. This puts a lot of effort on your muscles, which can lead to muscle strain.
Just like bruises and sprains, it would help you to put ice over your muscles in order to soothe the swelling. You should also rest your muscles and avoid any activities that require using your muscles for the meantime, such as parkour. Elevating the injured area to reduce the chances of swelling will also work.
To avoid muscle difficulties, you should focus on improving your strength and fitness through parkour training before engaging in high-intensity parkour. Take breaks after your parkour activities and avoid parkouring for extended periods. Always remember to never exhaust yourself too much to prevent this from happening again.
Tendonitis: Hurts You When You Least Expect It
Tendonitis is a rather innocuous parkour condition. It’s not as exciting as the others. It does not sting as much as the others. It sneaks up on you and hurts you when you’re not expecting it.
You just go out and work out, and you sense discomfort in your tendons, but you don’t notice much of it because it does not ache all that much, and you keep working out. The ache, though, continues. It steadily worsens till you are unable to train any longer. It also takes months to heal completely. You also can’t do any parkour while it heals.
Parkour, which is a high-impact activity, causes the tendon to stress injuries. Your tendons are put under a lot of stress when you run, leap, vault, or climb. If you don’t take enough breaks, you run the danger of tendinitis.
Same as the other strains and bruises, RICE method also works for tendonitis — rest, ice, compress, and elevate. Do these steps in order to hasten the healing process, and avoid parkour for the meantime. This is a small sacrifice compared to long-term effects if you do not listen to my advice.
You may avoid tendinitis by taking the following precautions. Work on strengthening your fitness and strength before attempting any high-intensity parkour. After your parkour activities, take a break, and don’t parkour for days on end.
Learn how to use proper techniques to reduce the negative impact on your body. Surely it will not hurt your performance if you take some rest for a few weeks. Your body will thank you because you have given your muscles some time to rest and recharge for the upcoming days.
Hand Rips: When You Grip Swings Too Hard
In parkour, the time you do not spend on your feet is spent on your hands. When you land or roll employing four-point landing techniques, your hands make touch with the earth. In parkour, you also utilize your hands when climbing and vaulting over obstacles.
In parkour, swinging also necessitates the use of your hands. When you perform parkour, it’s understandable that you can damage your hands. When the skin on your hand breaks away, the majority of these hand injuries occur.
They most frequently occur on the palms of your hands. They are generally small injuries that heal rapidly and do not require medical treatment. They can, however, be very painful, and depending on what you’re doing, they may force you to abandon your training for the day.
Swinging on bars is the most common cause of parkour hand rips. As your hand goes around the bar, the skin on the palms of your hands is exposed to a lot of friction, which can cause the skin to peel apart and tear open.
The skin on the palms of your hands, where your fingers attach to rest, can split apart due to calluses. That is because the skin around the callouses’ edges is a vulnerable spot that might rupture if you apply enough pressure.
Vaulting and climbing on uneven ground are two more causes of hand rips. Rough surfaces provide greater traction, making jumping, landing, vaulting, and climbing easier, but more traction also means more friction. If you apply enough effort to the surface, the friction can cause the skin on your hands to peel apart. To lessen the chance of hand rips, ensure you master simple parkour vaults.
Wash the ripped skin immediately when it happens. Clean the spot with soap and running water, but do not rub the soap directly into the ripped skin. Cool water is fine, as long as it is clean. Next, trim the excess skin so that it would not be pulled and damage your hand even more.
Keep your hand moisturized as it hastens the healing process, and then wrap it with a bandage. Apply moisturizer to your hands every day so that your skin does not get chapped whenever you play outside. For the meantime, you must stop playing parkour until your hand gets recovered, or you will be risking yourself to infection and gangrene.
To preserve your hands from friction, do not swing on bars for too long. When calluses on the palms of your hands get too thick, shave them down. When vaulting or climbing over rocky terrain, do not exert more effort than is required.
In parkour, your hands are just as crucial as your other body parts. Always look after them because if you get a serious hand rip, you could be forced to quit for good, which you don’t want to happen.
Shin Scrapes: When Your Shins Get Too Close to the Ground
When your shins come into contact with something, they get scraped and bruised. Minor injuries and parkour are the most frequent, and you may usually keep exercising once they occur. It is unusual to strike your shin so hard that the pain overwhelms you. If you hit your shins hard enough, you may suffer from hairline fractures.
Shin scrapes and bruises are caused by three sources.
The first cause is rails. When jumping to a ledge with a rail, your foot may slip between the top of the ledge and the bottom of the rail, causing your shin to slam against the rail. These produce bruises on your shins and almost seldom cause scratches unless the rail is sharp.
The second reason is landing with one foot on the ledge and the other on the ground when jumping towards a not too high on the ground. The leg’s shin with the foot on the ground may make contact with the ledge when your knees bend to absorb the shock of landing.
If you do not bounce back off the ledge, one or both of your feet will fall over the front of the ledge, causing your leap to be cut short. This usually results in scrapes when your legs descend the ledge.
Shin scrapes can lead to bruising most of the time, so perform ice compress on your shin scrape for five to seven minutes. Wash your shin with soap and running water once wounds or bleeding appear, and put a bandage over it.
When it comes time to land from your leaps, you should work on your parkour jumping style so that you can land properly.
Here are some things you can do to prevent shin bruises and scrapes from happening. Learn to regulate your leaps to know how much strength to put into them to land appropriately on ledges.
To improve your landing skill, leap across lesser distances. Learn how to recover from missed precision jump efforts to keep your feet from slipping off ledges.
Shoulder Bruises: When You Roll Wrongly
Your legs and arms are the bodily parts you utilize the most in parkour. You would assume that shoulder bruises wouldn’t happen to you because you don’t spend much time doing parkour.
It defies logic that you may get shoulder injuries while doing parkour, yet it does happen. However, there are some instances where your shoulder will contact the ground, and you may wind up injuring it if you fall too hard on it.
In parkour, the only source of shoulder bruising is improper rolling technique. This can occur during forwarding, backward, or sideward parkour rolling, although it is more prevalent during forward rolling.
This is because the forward roll is the most often used rolling technique among parkour competitors. Shoulder bruises occur when you roll too hard on your acromion or scapular spine, the bony portion of your shoulder at the top of your back.
If you don’t circle your back enough or dip your chin towards the opposite shoulder you are rolling on, you risk hurting it.
As it is customary with other bruises and strains, the RICE method also applies here. It would also help if you can stop doing parkour for a while until your shoulder bruises heal.
Here are some things you can do to avoid shoulder bruises. Begin with rolling on soft ground such as grass before progressing to concrete and other rough surfaces. Learn appropriate parkour rolling techniques and repeat the roll until you’re entirely comfortable with it. Rolling after leaping down from high locations should only be practiced after you’ve mastered rolling after jumping down from low ones.
Wrist Sprains: When You Vault the Wrong Way
Vaults may be harmful to your hands if you practice improper vaulting techniques.
Wrist sprains aren’t as prevalent as the other forms of sprains on our list, but they’re serious enough to keep you out of parkour training for weeks, if not months if they’re severe enough.
Since your wrists are more agile than your ankles and knees, they are less prevalent. As a result, getting your wrist into an abnormal posture is much more difficult. However, it may happen, and when it does, the consequences are disastrous.
Wrist sprains are produced by vaulting with your fingers too close to the sides. This prompted your wrist joint to move too far towards your thumb, stretching the ligaments there. They can also be created by using too much force when vaulting over objects. This puts a lot of strain on your ligaments, which can cause them to rip or bulge.
Similar to ankle strains, the RICE method also helps soothe any pain and discomfort for wrist sprains. Keep your wrist elevated and supported throughout the healing process, and rest for a while to avoid risking your wrist and getting more injuries.
Always keep these precautions in mind to avoid wrist sprains. Experiment with vaulting with your fingers pointing front. Learn how to regulate your vaults to avoid using more strength than necessary to go over obstructions.
Bone Fractures: When Everything Else Goes Broken
Sometimes you might land in such an uncomfortable posture that your bones shatter. That’s just one of the risks of performing parkour.
Although you should be concerned about spraining ligaments in your joints rather than bone fractures. The majority of parkour injuries I’ve seen concern joints above all. However, if you must shatter bones, they will likely be in your forearms. Falling on anything other than your feet is the most common cause of bone fractures.
Parkour athletes commonly fracture their bones when startled in the air after performing a maneuver they are scared of and grab for the ground or an obstruction awkwardly. This places their arms at risk of fracturing, which happens from time to time.
Bone fractures are usually healed with the help of casts or tourniquets. If it is too broken, you might have to undergo an orthopedic procedure in the hospital. Always consult a doctor whenever bone fractures happen because it might lead to crooked bones when left untreated.
You should follow these guidelines to avoid this from happening. Don’t do movements you’re too terrified to try unless you’re ready to risk it all. No matter what occurs in the air, practice landing safely. Learn how to properly bail so that you can recover without harming yourself after a fall.
Stay Safe And Practice Safe Parkour
Parkour is an active sport, and we cannot help but have a spurt of adrenaline rush here and there. When that happens, our bodies become too powerful that we are not prepared for it, and thus, injuries happen. Thus, it pays to be prepared and be careful. People say no pain, no gain, but it is also important that you still prioritize your welfare to practice the sport for a long time.
