| Risk Factors In Gymnastics |
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Despite use of the best equipment, other infrastructure, and coaches, if you still cannot entirely free your mind away from injury-related fears in gymnastics, you are not alone to think this way. For like ice hockey, training for gymnastics has also been found by medical experts to cause sometimes catastrophic bodily injuries to participants. Besides this, dieticians have also theorized that in an endeavor to scale new frontiers in gymnastics, some participants court eating disorders such as anorexia.
The above is especially true in the case of girl participants in gymnastics. Statistics indicate that injuries occurring during training are responsible for sidelining the gymnastics aspirations of a large number of girls. Curiously, this fact remains hidden from public attention. An independent study conducted found that girls were more prone to hand, elbow, and arm injuries than boys. The injuries caused during gymnastics training in the case of the latter were located mostly on the head and neck. The other aspect of gymnastics is that it can foster eating disorders in girl participants. Usually what happens is that in the enthusiasm for keeping their body in good shape for gymnastics, some girls overdo the bit about adherence to dietary restrictions. They quickly become anorexic as the obsession for staying slim takes over their mind in a firm grip. This can also happen to especially those participants, who perceive they have no life beyond being a gymnast. This social withdrawal can play unnecessary tricks on a girl's sense of balance and to escape from reality she may seek solace in anorexia to bolster her self-image. Girl participants are otherwise also too sensitive to the image they invoke in the eyes of the gymnastics viewing public and want to look good. For this psychology, the gymnastics viewing audience also is partly responsible, for a viewer's eyes stay for a longer period on a gymnast with a good figure. This propagates a certain image in the mind of girl participants, who do their utmost to sustain such an image. Therefore, to stay slim and trim, they overdo the dietary restrictions bit and fall as a result into the arms of anorexia. As you know, many gymnasts are incorrectly and overly influenced based on the effect of body size on the results of gymnastics performance. Of course to a certain extent, a gymnast with a slim and trim body can perform better than another who is more endowed by God and through hereditary transfer of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). However, when such correlation is twisted and taken to extreme levels, in the hope it will enhance performance, a gymnast simply punishes his/her body without any concomitant gymnastics performance results to show. Due to wrong interpretation by that gymnast, he/she thinks that even stricter dietary restrictions can achieve better gymnastics results. Such thinking is entirely erroneous and detrimental to the mind and body of the individual concerned on a long term basis. Related Articles
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