Crossfit and olympic style weightlifting gets a lot of bad publicity online, which leads outsiders to believe that these sports and training styles are dangerous, but as you will see in the data below, this could not be further from the truth.
In this article we will be comparing the amount of injuries that occur per every 1,000 training hours since this is how injury statistics are typically measured. The sports in question are:
- Crossfit
- Olympic Weightlifting
- Football
- Soccer
- Basketball
Let’s begin.
What is The Injury Rate in Crossfit?
How many injuries would you predict occur for every 1,000 hours of practicing Crossfit? If you guessed anything over 1 you would be wrong.
That’s correct.
A 4 year study conducted by the National Institutes of Health found that the injury rate for Crossfit was only 0.27 for every 1,000 training hours.
It looks like all of the hate on Crossfit training needs to stop.
“Overall, and based on the assumed maximum number of workout hours per week, the injury rate was 0.27 per 1000 hours (females: 0.28; males: 0.26), whereas the assumed minimum number of workout hours per week resulted in an injury rate of 0.74 per 1000 hours (females: 0.78; males: 0.70).”
National Institutes of Health
It is also important to note that among the small group of people that got injured often, the majority of them were beginners to Crossfit (6 months or newer).
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What is The Injury Rate in Olympic Weightlifting?
How many times has your mom told you not to lift too much weight because you’ll end up hurting yourself? Turns out she was wrong…
In terms of injuries Olympic Weightlifting is not far behind Crossfit, and is actually the 2nd safest sport on this list.
There are only 2.4-3.3 injuries that occur per every 1,000 training hours when performing Olympic weightlifting, according to data by EvidenceStrong.com
After doing research on 663 olympic weightlifters in all levels of the sport they found that 90% of “injuries” did not cause athletes to rest for more than 1 day, and only 0.5% caused athletes to rest for more than 3 weeks.
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What is The Injury Rate in Football?
This probably won’t be a shock to any of you when you find out that football has the highest numbers of injuries of any sport on this list, but there is something interesting in the data that I’d like to point out.
When we look at training hours the data shows that the injury rate is only 8 injuries per every 1,000 training hours. That’s still much higher than Crossfit or Olympic weightlifting, but lower than you might have expected. But don’t be too surprised yet, keep reading.
The injury rate for “game exposure” is much higher at 36 injuries per 1,000 hours competing.
Unlike the other 2 sports above, football athletes typically train much less intensive than they level they compete at, causing many more injuries.
What is The Injury Rate in Basketball?
Basketball is in the same situation as football when we compare training hours to competing hours.
Basketball has 18.3 injuries per every 1,000 training hours, but…
24.7 injuries per every 1,000 playing hours.
These results were gathered by observing over 10,000 basketball players, and ankle injuries were found to be the number 1 injury.
What is The Injury Rate in Soccer?
We are leaving soccer for last due to their wide range of results that were discovered.
According to the National Institutes of Health, soccer players have an injury rate of between 4-35 for every 1,000 training hours.
What was interesting to note however, was the fact that the average length of recovery for these injuries was around 2 weeks.
Hamstring strains, ankle injuries, and adductor strains were the most common injuries.
After looking at the facts above it should be clear that Crossfit and Olympic weightlifting are not dangerous and should not be avoided out of fear.
In fact they are much safer than many of the other sports out there (besides chess).
Share this article with anyone that’s scared about starting their Crossfit / oly lifting journeys.
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