In the recent podcast on injury risk reduction an injury was defined as a “dysfunction” or reduction in performance accompanied by a report of pain or a deformity accompanied by a decrease in performance. In regards to the “pain” component of the definition, it was discussed that DOMS could classify as an injury depending on the context in which the lifter interpreted their DOMS and whether they voluntarily reduced the weight on the bar, thereby ruling themselves in to the definition of being injured.
Further into the podcast “fatigue” was described as “that which causes a decrement in performance”. At certain levels of fatigue, particularly for a strength athlete, fatigue can be accompanied by muscle soreness, or “pain”. Therefore, if there is an involuntary decrement in performance brought on by fatigue and that is accompanied by a report of pain, then fatigue is an injury.
If we look at the linguistic implication of the word injury, my own subjective sense of the word based on my social learning would say that fatigue is not an injury. In fact I would say that it is not an injury without a structural change and that the structural change must be outside that which is normally expected from that activity. For example, DOMS is due to muscle tearing but as DOMS is expected from a novel stimulus it could not be classified as an injury.
I would suggest that an injury should be defined as an unexpected deformity (fracture, swelling, bruising, tearing) and a report of pain accompanied by a decrease in performance, and anything that does not meet that definition is not an injury but is simply non-specific pain or an asymptomatic deformity.
I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this topic and to hear some other perspectives that I may not have considered .
Isn’t subjectivity built into your proposed definition? What if one person ‘expects’ DOMS and someone else doesn’t? Would that qualify as an injury for one person and not the other, despite same physiological status? What if one person reports it as pain and has performance decrements and the other doesn’t?
What if I block a soccer kick with my body and expect it to bruise, hurt, and decrease my performance? Would that still be non-specific pain, even though there is a known cause, which I expected?
Interesting topic
Accumulated fatige is taken care by load management and maybe (more) rest days (i.e.: in case you are training 6 days a week for two hrs each with an RPE @ 10).
So the question would be: In what way are we improving the whole situation in the case we are saying, that fatigue is an injury?
I would say that we dont at all. If we would say fatigue is an injury, then we would treat that injury with:
Load management and breaks (which itself means that we take care of fatigue) and that sounds circular to me.
The current definition of an injury does not include "structural change since theres no correlation of “structural change” and pain or performance decrease.
How do we draw a line of what is normally expected?
Is it normal for a 70yo overweight person to have “deformities” on his hip? If so, what does overweight mean? How about a 65/60/55/50/45/40/35/30yo/… person?
Where do you want to draw the line? What if we see deformities (lets say hip in a 25yo) which we only said are “normal” in a 80+yo person but the 25yo doesnt have pain?
@topherchris and @jab You both point out issues with the subjectivity of my use of the word “expected”, which I agree has some major issues. I’m trying to make the differentiation between our experience of DOMS that is a normal part of training when we encounter a novel stimulus and an event like being kicked during a soccer match. However, you could say that being kicked by another player during a soccer match is to be expected, which would rule any bruise or fracture out of my suggested definition. In your opinion, is there a way that we could define “injury” that rules out DOMS or performance a decrement from fatigue and associated muscular discomfort but rules in an “expected” scenario where we are kicked by another player on the soccer field?
@topherchris, I have used the phrase “structural change” interchangeably with the word “deformity”, which Jordan used in his definition in the podcast