When starting any sport, the first thing that you do is to warm up and stretch. It is always important to warm up and stretch thoroughly and each sport will have a specific type of warm up to utilise the muscles required.

Karate and other martial arts are no different, to prevent injury, you need to be warming up and stretching thoroughly. Recommended time spent on warming up and stretching should be around 30 to 40 mins. Followed by a cool down at the end of the session for about 10 – 20 mins.

By doing this this reduced the chance of DOMS (Delayed on set of muscle soreness)

However, you have to realise that if you are training in a martial art, then this is classed as a combat sport. You can do whatever it takes to prevent injuries, but it is inevitable that you are going to get hurt.

The thought of this puts people off knowing that they are going to get hurt or will do at some point in their training.

As Gichin Funakoshi said, accidents come out of idleness,

So what sort of injuries am I going to be expected to receive?

Injuries can vary, some are as a result from other practitioners making contact with you. Other injuries occur due to poor warm up and stretching or poor control by yourself.

Common injuries that occur are:

Cramp

Pulled muscles

General aches, pains and soreness to the body from contact by another person or from not warming up, and cooling down.

Bruising to the forearms and wrist however this is common because you are conditioning the arms when blocking and in time this will stop as the body will become use to the contact in that area.

Nose bleeds

Winded

Black eyes

Swollen lip

Broken toes

Broken fingers

Poke to the eye

Cuts to the feet due to other students having long toenails.

Possible dislocations of joints i.e. fingers, shoulders or knees

Accidental injury to the groin

And in severe cases knocked unconscious

One way to reduce the possibility of injury is for the instructors to do a risk assessment and also have first aid kits on site in case injury does occur, then it can be dealt with quickly.

Pads are another way of protecting yourself and reducing injury, however then can also be the cause of injury as the pads may make contact with your skin, causing friction burns and also by wearing pads, your focus goes and you start to loose control of your technique because by wearing pads they give you a false sense of security, thinking that you can’t get hurt as your wearing protective padding.

As long as you are training consistently this will hep reduce the likely hood of injury but always practice with caution.