Advice in Decreasing Football Injuries

One of the most common injuries in football is an injury to the medial collateral ligament (MCL). The MCL holds the inside of your knee together, and keeps your leg from collapsing inwards. This ligament can be damaged by a blow to the outside of the knee pushing inwards. MCL strains and tears are fairly common in football. Mostly the center and the guards are ones who get this injury, due to the grip trend on their cleats (sometimes a helmet hits their knee). The number of football players who get this injury has increased in recent years. Usually the player can continue playing, perhaps with a brace.

Since most sports are full contact sports, injuries are common among players, especially football players. Of course, any sport has its number of injury to players. However, there are ways to prevent them while playing. If you're prone to knee injuries, then wearing a knee brace is one way to help prevent any injury to your knees. Another way is to properly warm the muscles and joints before you start playing, especially football since it is such a contact "knock em' down" sport.

Using stretching routines will warm up the muscles nicely before any type of sport specially the ligaments in your legs and arms. Ligaments are the easiest to injure no matter what sport you're playing. Muscles take more of the impact if you're playing football, but you can still end up with pulled muscles if they aren't warmed properly.

Besides doing stretching exercises you should also include some of these exercises into your warm up routine:

Do at least 10 reps of each:

Knee hugs - bring knees up to your chest

Backward lunge - step back on the toes of your foot

Forward lunge - step forward on the heel of your foot

Lateral squats - instead of down squats, squat to the side

Adding these to your normal warm up routine will warm up the tendons, muscles, ligaments, and joints. Stretching, of course, are the best to warm up the legs and arms, so you don't acquire any injuries. Even jogging can cause injury if you don't warm up the body first. If you're playing football, then warm-up routines are quite necessary to prevent injury.

In addition, wearing a knee brace can help prevent the twisting motion that causes the damage. Though, wearing a knee brace is a little awkward to begin with, the more you practice wearing it, the easier it will be to play with it on your knee. There has been great advancement in the industry of athletic knee braces, making it easier to help prevent these common injuries.