Wear and tear injuries in athletes--an overview.

Governments and Governmental organisations are currently encouraging people to take part in exercise, and particularly competitive exercise, without apparent regard to one inevitable consequence, an increasing incidence of injuries. By definition physical exercise involves stress which is being applied through sport to more and more people. Figures made available by the Central Council of Physical Recreation some time ago indicate the enormous growth in participation in sporting activities. Practically every sport in the U.K. nowadays, from judo through archery to squash, is claiming to be the major growth sport. More and more people, as they do less and less physical work to earn their livings, are doing more and more physical work to earn a feeling of fitness, to sleep well and so on, and they are doing it through sport. Sport, by applying stress to the body will produce an intended training effect, that is to say improve the capacity of the body to cope with that stress. Man is a homeostatic creature in that he likes to keep his internal environment constant. When he takes exercise he disturbs the basic resting internal environment, and all the physiological changes which take place as a result of exercise are designed to restore the "milieu interieur" to its resting state. The borderline between the training load that induces the right level of stress to produce a training effect and the training load that is too stressful and produces injury is very illdefined.