Characteristics of sports injuries and factors associated with injury in beginners of female artistic gymnastics

Abstract

The artistic gymnastics is a modality that associates arts with biomechanical gestures, and it has been prominent among children and adolescents. Its practice can lead to sports injuries; therefore, it is important to know the factors inherent to trauma for the formulation of preventive models. Thus, the objective of this study was to characterize sports injuries and to verify factors associated with injury in people practicing artistic gymnastics with different levels of competitiveness. Forty-six gymnasts were interviewed with mean age of 10.1±2.0 years for female participants, who were classified in two competitive levels, i.e, initiation and training. We used the morbidity questionnaire adapted to sports characteristics to collect personal, training, and injury data. It was observed that injury risk was 0.3 injuries per athlete and 1.4 injuries per injured athlete, in which the gymnasts of the training category showed a higher frequency of the injury (83.3%; n=10) compared with the ones in the initiation category (10.5%; n=4). For both levels of competitiveness, training moment and light severity were the most reported variables. In the mechanism, contactless was more prevalent in the training category (90%; n=9) and the direct contact was more common at initiation category (75%; n=3). Anthropometric and training variables were considered as factors associated with injury to the gymnasts. It is concluded that gymnasts of the training category have higher injury frequency. Anthropometric and training variables were factors associated with injury. Characteristics of the injuries depend on the competitiveness level of the ­gymnasts.