Ultimate Frisbee Injuries in 2024
Based off Ultimate Frisbee athletes who attended my clinic
Photo taken by John Keenan , follow him for more!
I fell behind my own schedule goals of getting this out in February but anyway here are the 2024 stats for clinical injuries from Ultimate Frisbee athletes in my practice!
Some qualifications:
I did not include stats for sessions where people were in for ‘routine maintenance’. They may have had little niggles or mobility concerns but I wouldn’t consider them injuries as they were fully able to participate in trainings and competitions. Likewise I didn’t include bookings that were made for injury prevention.
Clients came in with 2 issues sometimes or they came in twice at different points of the year. I did not make any distinctions in the presentation of the data for this but this is why there are more injuries than people in the figures.
I haven’t recorded how many sessions each person had, for example to find out how quickly and completely people recovered. It gets too complicated; some people don’t want to spend money on more than one session and I’m not going to spend my time chasing up on their progress (it’s possible one session was all they needed too). Other people can take sometimes 4 or more weeks (even months) between sessions because they’re in no hurry to get back, work has them busy, they had a holiday or sickness in between, they can play through it so it lacks urgency, etc. So they’re not following the fastest progression they could. Others don’t quite commit to my process and go down the MRI and specialist route. And then others again just want to get to a point where they are able to play, even if there is still some pain, so they stop physio sessions once they get to that point (usually for financial reasons - hello students!). In an ideal world I would be recording these kinds of detailed stats for all my clients in a lovely big spreadsheet - and perhaps this is a project I’ll undertake in the future - but for now it’s just the basics.
It shouldn’t be assumed that all injuries are caused by Ultimate alone as some of these clients have other hobbies too (I know, so weird) but I aimed to keep in mostly those that were linked with them playing or being unable to play because of the injury. All clients noted are active Ultimate players (from social to EUCF level), which was the overriding choice for what cases to include.
The ACL cases were not always new to 2024; 5/7 cases were surgeries carried out in 2023. One case came to me for help 6 months after surgery but all others came to me from the start of their rehab. Not all tears were actually caused by Ultimate (one was during hurling, another during basketball) but they are active players (some at EUCF level) or want to be able the choice to be able to return to the sport even it’s just for fun so their rehab covered those needs.
I did a similar graph in 2023 but it was just for the first 6 months of the year, January to June1:
I tried to categorise the injuries for 2024 as a broad overview of what seems to cause them.
A few thoughts from the data:
Back pain cases were well up. I can’t say I can see a reason for that. 5 cases occurred while playing, 1 from starting a new desk job, 1 was sleeping on a couch, 2 had back pain ongoing for years and 1 mild case was attributed to overtraining in the gym. Having so many cases come on while playing is something that is quite new to my practice. The rest are far more typical reasons for back pain. The playing causes were from collisions, landings, overload and layouts. One thing generally in common with those causes is the effects of impact from the ground or other players. Tolerating these forces is an essential component for field athletes.
Shoulders continue to be injured mostly from layouts. 2 cases were chronic instability from lax ligaments and would suffer repeat full or partial dislocations.
The busiest months of the year were January (12 - 3 of the visits being ongoing ACL care) and July (9 - 1 ACL case). There were always cases soon after or before tournaments during the year though.
I cannot see any differences in injury susceptibility based on gender except maybe that ACL cases were 5 female and 2 male.
I didn’t expect to see a trend for one side being affected by the other more but likewise I wasn’t expecting to see it split almost exactly down the middle! 28 right sided injuries, 29 left sided injuries (and the other 12 occurring bilaterally).
There were similarities in trends between 2023’s data and this newer data. Overload continues to be the main cause - this is why physical preparation is so useful and important for serious players. Insufficient movement capabilities and a poor engine will lead to body parts feeling stressed out sooner, meaning you might not make it through a tournament without feeling pain somewhere. Landing from jumps, layouts and changes of direction all feature again too.
Hopefully based on this information you can see where physical preparation focuses should be! Please feel free to ask questions as always.
I didn’t realise I only did it to June until I started writing this post. I’m unlikely to dedicate time to go back through the rest of 2023 but perhaps on a slow day it could be worth a glance.