Stretching and injuries in men undertaking running training

Abstract

Introduction. Physical activity appears in men’s life from the very beginning of their existence, however over last few decades it has become more popular as an amateur sport and recreation. One of the simplest form of physical activity considered as sport is running. Runners very often begin workouts thinking about improving their health but it comes with a risk of getting injured. There are however a lot of factors which can prevent injuries to occur. One of them is doing stretching exercises. The purpose of the study is to validate if stretching exercises can lower the risk of suffering an injury by men beginning a running workouts. In this study it was assumed that doing additional stretching exercises lowers the risk of suffering an injury and is common in people training long-distance running. Materials and Methods.182 men who do running workouts in the city of Bydgoszcz were examined with the use of author’s original questionnaire. It concerned sociodemographic data, running-related issues, stretching and the aspects of sports injuries. Statistics. Ordinal scales were analyzed with nonparametric rank tests, such as the Mann-Withney test, while the nominal scales were tested with nonparametric tests from the Pearson's chi-squared test group. Results. It was found that the largest group of runners are men aged about 32 years, doing running workouts as a part of amateur sport. Of all the subjects, 31% of runners declared the use of additional stretching training. People running with greater frequency and volume, expressed in kilometers, more often decide to undertake stretching exercises. 70% of tested athletes suffered a running-related injury. There was no significant effect of stretching on reducing the risk of injury to runners. Conclusions. Stretching is not very popular among running enthusiasts. Greater running experience and high training loads are factors that make runners decide to use additional stretching exercises more often. The lack of significant differences in the frequency of injuries of competitors using and not undertaking stretching does not allow an unequivocal assessment of its impact on reducing the risk of injury in runners.