These are the Top 7 injuries that I see most people get in the parkour community and the most common ones that I personally have had. I’m going to list the top 7 and explain why they usually occur.
Knowing these common injuries and what causes them will help you prevent these injuries from happening to you and save you a lot of pain and wasted time.
Contents
1. Foot and Hand Bruises
These are impact force injuries. They occur when you take too big of an impact, use improper form, or haven’t conditioned properly for your body to take the impact. For example on big landings, really long or high precisions, diving kongs, dive rolls, and other high-impact moves. These are quite annoying since you are constantly using both feet and both hands in parkour so it usually takes forever for these to completely heal.
The good thing is that these bruises are usually minor injuries that are really more painful than debilitating. But if it starts swelling pretty bad or doesn’t start to feel better after a few days, you might have something a little more serious like a hairline fracture. At this point, you would want to get it checked out by a doctor to see if you should take more rest.
A few good ways to prevent these injuries are to:
- Learn the proper technique for landing and vaulting.
- Make sure the force is evenly distributed throughout the body. Example: For the basic landing keep your legs shoulder width apart, land on the balls of the feet, and make sure your joints are aligned properly.
- Start small and gradually build up. This way your hands and feet have time to build up.
- You should also look into barefoot training and conditioning.
2. Shin Hits
Shin injuries SUCK! The shin is a very sharp bone and sensitive area without much protection, which causes it to be very susceptible to cuts and deep gashes that are pretty painful. These are most common on botched precisions or slipping on rail work. Most of the time people will make the mistake of having one foot slightly ahead of the other on precisions which cause the foot further back to slip right off the rail or ledge and slam the shin full force into the obstacle.
A few good ways to prevent these injuries are to:
- Be sure your feet are close together and even when doing precisions.
- Gradually build up to smaller landings and bigger gaps. This way your body has time to build up coordination and body awareness.
3. Knee Capitations
The dreaded knee capitation. I’ve had a handful of knee capitations. Not too fun. These occur when you slam your knee or if you’re lucky your upper thigh into an obstacle. These usually happen when you are performing a kong vault or speed vault, and I’ve even gotten one trying to do a fast climb up. You run full speed and hit the vault but one of your knees happens to be just slightly too low and catches the ledge or rail. These can be pretty painful. I remember one I did during a full-out kong vault, the impact was so hard it literally made me sick to my stomach ha.
A few good ways to prevent these injuries are to:
- Learn the proper form to your vault.
- Make sure to keep your legs tucked.
- Keep those hips up.
4. Knee Sprains
These knee sprains and knee injuries are probably the most devastating and take the longest to heal especially when people suffer a more serious knee ligament or tendon injury such as a torn ACL. These occur from improper landings, overtraining, not conditioning properly, or having imbalances in the body. The risk of these injuries increases 10-fold when you start to incorporate flips and twisting movements off of obstacles.
A few good ways to prevent these injuries are to:
- Learn proper landing techniques. So make sure when you land a move your body is absorbing the impact as evenly as possible and keeping your joints aligned.
- Give your body a days rest between really hard training sessions so it can rebuild.
- Implement a proper warm up before each training session
- Condition the body properly so that you are strengthening your muscles and joints but also do not creating imbalances. Make sure when you working on jumps or moves like the wall run, you train both legs. Do workouts that work your quads and your hamstrings. Training barefoot will help with your body alignment and posture. If you have an alignment problem in your feet, then it can cause pain to your knees.
- Implement a good stretching routine following your training. The more flexible you are the the more force your body can handle safely.
- Start to improve your balance. This will increase your joint strength and your body awareness.
5. Ankle Sprains
These are probably the most common injuries, especially for those just getting into parkour. These occur a lot during precisions, stride precisions, wall runs, or landings where we put too much pressure or strain on a part of the ankle joint. Whenever you “jam”, “twist”, or “roll” your ankle you are spraining the joint. Again, moves with extra twisting and flipping will increase the chances of spraining your ankles. The four main root causes for ankle sprains are imbalances in the body, poor flexibility, lack of ankle strength, and poor form.
A few good ways to prevent these injuries are to:
- Learn proper landing techniques. So make sure when you land a move your body is absorbing the impact as evenly as possible and keeping your joints aligned.
- Make sure to give your body a day’s rest between really hard training sessions so it can rebuild.
- Implement a proper warm-up before each training session
- Condition the body properly so that you are strengthening your muscles and joints but also not creating imbalances. Calf raises, squat jumps, and split leg box jumps are great basic lower-body exercises that help build up your ankle joints. Again, training barefoot helps with body alignment and posture.
- Implement a good stretching routine following your training. The more flexible you are the the more force your body can handle safely.
- Start to improve your balance. This will increase your joint strength and your body awareness.
- Keep the ankle active. Meaning it’s prepared for the landing. If you going into a precision, point the foot so that when you hit the precision you give your ankle joint plenty of room to absorb. Honorable mention of the hip or shoulder pain from first learning the parkour roll.
6. Shoulder and Hip Bruise from the roll
Almost every experiences this pain when transferring their parkour rolls from grass to harder surfaces such as concrete. You either hit to hard on the shoulder or hit that annoying hip bone that sticks out a little bit on your lower back. These injuries can be pretty painful and turn into chronic injuries If you don’t correct your form or give yourself proper rest.
Watch a video showing you how to avoid hitting your hips and shoulders:
A few good ways to prevent these injuries are to:
- Learn proper roll techniques. If you’re hitting that hip bone make sure you are keeping your legs tucked in tight all the way through the roll. Try coming out of the roll either more along the side or more toward the center of your hip to avoid that bone. This will take some testing to get perfectly right for you. If you are hitting your shoulder, try tucking it in more and using more of your arms for support. You want to roll over the back of the shoulder and on the muscle.
- Make sure to give your body rest after you bruise and get stronger.
- Start with really soft surfaces and gradually increase to harder ones. This way your body can have time to build up.
7. Rips on the Hands
Rips really come into play when you start getting more involved in bar work especially lache work. Big rips can put your hands out of commission for a couple of days on bar work and burn like crazy. These occur when the skin bunches up from the friction of the bar on the hands. When the skin bunches up too much, there is too much pressure on the skin and it causes the skin to rip. These are much worse when you have big calluses or an accumulation of dead skin on the hand. Calluses are great for keeping the hands protected but not good when doing bar work because this extra skin bunches up much easier and causes the rips to be much deeper and worse. Now rips are kinda painful painful but they heal up fairly quickly and usually only require a simple clean-up and wrap job like any other minor scrap or cut.
A few good ways to prevent these injuries are to:
- Remove the collection of dead skin on your hand. So you want to shave down those big calluses so they do not start to bunch up and rip. Most people use sandpaper or pumice rock to shave them down.
- When you feel your calluses bunching up or they start to feel pain when you’re doing bar work, that’s a good sign they are getting ready to rip. Stop and move on to some other movement.
These are the most common injuries that I personally have experienced and witnessed over the years. If you have some other injuries that you seem to get all the time or see as a common occurrence in the parkour community, be sure to post them below in the comments.
And again, I’m not a doctor or an expert in medicine. This is just what I have found through my years of training and teaching. You should always do your own research or consult a physician or expert for any health or medical advice.