Ninja Warrior Injury Prevention: Forearm Overuse Injury
Hopefully you’ve already read the introduction article and have a rough idea of what this article is for; but first a quick disclaimer. I am not a medical practitioner and am not prescribing any rehab or therapy methods or exercises; I am simply collecting and presenting scientific literature about these topics to provide information to athletes and coaches participating in Ninja Warrior. With that out of the way, on to the article.
The Forearm
For the first batch of research into ninja injury prevention, I selfishly have decided to start with the forearm; I personally have had the most trouble with straining and abusing my gripping muscles. That being said, I do think that this is still a reasonable section to begin with; there are a lot of moving parts in your forearms, and they can be fairly easy to damage. Also, this is not including the elbow joint yet, that will have its own article as well.
The layout of this article is going to give you a full bank of knowledge to try and answer whatever questions you might have about issues you are having or training that you are interested in. We are first going to do a little bit of an arm anatomy lesson, then go into some common injuries and other issues that arise in the forearms, and finally wrap it all up with some preventative exercises, rehab exercises and methods, and other specific forms of recovery.
Anatomy
Anterior Forearm
Posterior Forearm
Ok. Yes there are a bunch of latin names; No, you do not need to memorize them all, this isn’t your Anatomy & Physiology class. I just think this is generally some important information to have in the back of your mind, or also just to keep around so that if you do feel some soreness or weakness, you will be able to target specific muscles a little easier.
The first image shows the Anterior Forearm (palm facing up) muscles and tendons; the bottom image is the Posterior Forearm (palm facing down). The muscles being the reddish-pink, and the tendons being white; (and the bones are the tan-ish boney things). Although it may sound a little obvious now, the anterior side shows the muscles that are used to close the hand and grip things, the Flexor muscles. The posterior side shows the muscles that are used to raise the hand and fingers up, the Extensor muscles. If you move your hand and fingers around in pretty much any direction you can usually see which parts of your arm are moving with them. Now, flexor and extensor muscles are not exclusively on one side or the other, your arm is tube; so there isn’t actually an up and down, everything is relative to where you’re looking from.
Overuse Injury
I am going to start out with one of the most prevalent issues that athletes might come across when actively participating in Ninja Warrior, or other similar activities. Overuse injuries are commonly occurring and have a fairly short time to recovery, and generally don’t cause long lasting damage, so long as they are properly treated. These might show themselves in the form of persistent muscle soreness and tightness. Typically this might come from excessive training without proper rest, leading to continuous inflammation.
With that caveat out of the way; let’s move on to connecting this concept of overuse back to the forearm, and even broader, to Ninja Warrior. This sport is a fast-paced, high-impact sport; but conversely, there is also a massive dependence on gip endurance. Although I am more of a fan of balance obstacles, it’s fairly easy to point out that, nowadays, Ninja Warrior is heavily skewed towards upper body obstacles. Under the larger heading of upper body obstacles, there is further division: grip endurance (ex. Cliffhanger), and arm strength (ex. Salmon Ladder). Yes, there is crossover, but proportionally the activities will favor one skill over the other.
As we are discussing Overuse Injuries, we will first hone in on the grip endurance intensive obstacles. The reasoning behind this, extended bouts of grip at a high intensity, is not a normal thing for people to do. Unless you grow up in the sport, or something equally out of the norm, grip endurance will not be extraordinarily high. It can be pretty easy to overuse and strain the forearms when first trying out the sport, without proper preventative measures. Additionally, as you get older, you become more susceptible to this problem.
When doing the gripping action in Ninja Warrior, the Prime Movers (main contracting muscles performing the action) are the Flexors; moving the fingers specifically are the Flexor Digitorum and Flexor Pollicis Longus. Although small, these muscles are quite strong and resilient, that is, in comparison to their Antagonists (the muscles contracting in the opposite direction of the action, for balance). Opposite to the finger Flexors, are the finger Extensors, the Extensor Digitorum and Extensor Pollicis Longus.
Finally 1000 words in, we get to the main focus of this article. Forearm pain, soreness, or inflammation pain, are generally coming from the finger extensor muscles. When you are gripping onto an obstacle in Ninja Warrior, and especially if you are flying into a gripping obstacle, your extensor muscles bear the full force of your bodyweight. In this position, they are either in an Isometric Contraction, or in an Eccentric Contraction.
For visualization, let’s really quickly look at arm movement using the Biceps Brachii muscle. Starting from a 90° angle, flexing the arm in towards your shoulder is a Concentric Contraction, extending the arm out straight is an Eccentric Contraction, and not moving it is an Isometric Contraction.
In an eccentric movement, the muscle is already loaded, with the muscle fibers overlapping; this leads to a stronger movement than a concentric contraction, but also more damage to the fibers. The cycle of damaging and repairing muscle fibers is a great process, it's what leads to muscle growth; however, without proper rest and recovery, the damage piles up and injuries occur.
Injury Prevention and Recovery
Now that we know what is injured, or what we want to protect from injury, we can proceed to the proper methods of prevention and recovery. There aren’t really any magic pills that will automatically save your forearms from damage, but there are a few simple no-cost treatments that apply to both prehab and rehab. Sleep, don’t overuse the muscles, eat well, and as mentioned before, allow your body’s natural healing process to heal.
The first step in this process would be to properly train up the muscles that are getting heavily used during exercise. Tacking on some extensor warm-ups to the beginning of your normal warm-up routine is decently simple.
The recovery process should always begin with proper rest; let the muscles and tendons take some time after exercising them. If they still feel weak when you go to do another workout, they might not be fully recovered yet. There are two types of recovery that need to occur for training to progress smoothly. The first is Muscular Recovery. The muscle fibers themselves are being ripped apart at the seams when you are exercising, significantly more so when doing eccentric contractions like the finger extensor muscles during hanging obstacles.
The second part of the recovery process is Neuromuscular Recovery. Muscles don’t move all on their own, they receive signals from the brian through nerve pathways that connect to muscle fiber bundles. The nervous system can also become worn down, leading to slower contractions with less force; even if the muscle fibers themselves were fully recovered, if the motor neurons aren’t able to fire at full capacity, the muscles can’t activate to their full potential. There are several reasons why this type of fatigue will occur, but generally it will have something to do with the sending and receiving of neurotransmitters (chemicals used to send signals within the nervous system). As for most other things, adequate sleep and a good diet will be the best method for recovery to take place.
After the basic steps for recovery are met, some additional things that can be done to aid in the process would be: low intensity static stretching, heating and cooling of the muscle fibers, and if necessary, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. The dynamic stretches and warm-ups listed above can be slowed down and altered into static stretching for the forearm muscles. Any slow movement of a muscle into an isometric hold for an extended period of time is a static stretch.
Temperature is one of the most important factors when it comes to muscle performance and recovery, and I will cover that topic in several in depth articles. The basic notes are: muscles shut down when they get too hot, and they are slow to act when too cold; the body overall functions better when in a small range of temperature around what your natural resting core temperature is.
The main affective points about temperature for forearm recovery are as follows.
Between sets cooling on the palms, face, or bottoms of feet. Not too cold to cause vaso-constriction in any of the points, just colder than resting body temperature. The purpose of this cooling is to efficiently cool down the core body temperature, and equalize body temperature overall, leading to proper muscle function.
AVOID cooling immediately post exercise when the trained muscles are hypertrophied and showing signs of inflammation. Temporary inflammation is a component of recovery. If pain and inflammation persist, then localized muscle cooling can be effective for dulling the pain.
Localized heating on the trained muscles increases blood flow in the muscles while avoiding raising core body temperature by too much. This can help aid in the post exercise recovery process. Not to be done immediately after exercise when the site will already be inflamed.
Conclusion
That was much longer than I anticipated, and I was barely able to scratch the surface of what can happen in the forearm. I decided to hone in on just overuse injury in the forearm, prevention, and recovery, rather than everything that could happen there. There will be a lot of crossover between articles about similar injuries and similar prehab/rehab protocols, as there are many shared aspects. The key takeaways are, allow yourself some time to rest your muscles and tendons, the more recovery you have, the more growth will follow.
Thank you,
R. Andrew Paxton, B.S., M.S. Kinesiology
Head Coach & Trainer, Coeur Ninja
e: robertpaxton11@gmail.com
p: (615) 424-3239
w: https://ninjapaxton.blogspot.com/
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