Mountain Biking Injuries
There's a lot to do in the outdoors to get your body moving and your blood pumping with adrenaline. Mountain biking is one of those popular sports where the risk of injury is greater than in other types of sports.
If you love what you do, and want to keep doing it, it’s important to take care of yourself and anticipate the types of injuries you're most likely to receive.
The most common way to be injured in mountain biking, is of course fall injuries after wiping out on a turn, or impacting a tree.
With both risks we can easily anticipate that bone fractures and head trauma being the likely cause of danger.
A FOOSH is a medical term to describe a type of fall injury.
FOOSH stands for:
Fell
On
Out
Stretched
Hand
When you fall forward, a natural instinct is to reach out hour hand to try and control your fall, so you don’t take additional damage to the rest of your body. This can cause a fracture, however, if the force of the impact is too great.
Falls of this kind a very common in Mountain Biking and from this we can prepare with some extra trauma gear, and skills for taking care of a fracture until help can arrive to take over.
Here are some things that might help you walk off the mountain:
- Wear your helmet and other PPE
If you do anything dangerous for long enough, you will get hurt. It’s just part of life. But if we are wearing our armor, the injuries we sustain will be far less devastating. If your sport, whether mountain biking or anything else, suggests wearing things like a chest protector and helmet, you should. There's a good reason for it and it might make your day, and the rest of your life better when you don’t have to breathe through a tube.
- Learn some basic fracture care and splinting techniques. Understanding how to take care of a broken humorous quickly turns you into a hero when everyone else is struggling to know what to do.
- Head and neck trauma are a very real possibility and being able to recognize a dangerous situation quickly so EMS can be activated is an essential part of care for your injured riding partners.
- Trauma gear is essential. Having the gear you need to take care of the injuries you’ll see in mountain biking is something you’ll be happy you prepped ahead of time. The downside is only that you have gear available that you will hopefully never have to use. But if you do need it, your life and the life of those around you will be substantially better.
If you'd like to learn more about using the gear in your trauma kit, check out the Mountain Man Medical Emergency Trauma Response Course. It’s free and will get you started in the basics.