Injury Rates in Iranian Taekwondo Athletes; a Prospective Study

Purpose: taekwondo, as the most popular martial art amongiranian sportsmen, might lead to injury for the athletes of thissport during competitions. we decided to report the incidence rateof injuries sustained by the athletes of this sport during nationalcompetitions.methods: all competitions of iran national championshiptaekwondo league in 2006-2007 with 204 athletes were observedprospectively to detect the occurrence of injuries. the severity ofinjuries was classified into four groups (mild, moderate, severe, andcritical) according to the involvement of medical care team in thecontest, ability of the athletes to resume and duration of probableabsence of injured athletes from future competitions and trainingsessions. athlete-exposure (a-e) was defined as the number ofcompetitions multiplied by two. on this base, the rate of injuryincidence per 1000 a-es, the rate of injuries per time unit and therate of injury occurred for each 100 athletes were considered as themajor outcomes of this study.results: of totally 1,338 a-es, 93 injuries were recorded during thecompetitions. the rate of injury incidence was found to be 69.5injuries per 1000 a-es and the rate of injuries per minute ofcompetitions was 0.023 which corresponded to 23.3 injuries per1000 minutes of competitions. 45.6 injuries were occurred for each100 athletes during the course of competitions. the most frequentinjuries were mild (68.8%) and critical injuries (24.7%), followedby moderate and severe injuries; 4.3% and 2.1%, respectively.conclusion: the rate of injury we found was lower than that ofwestern countries. in spite of finding the lower limbs as the mostfrequent place of injuries in other studies, we found the upperlimbs as the most predisposed place of injuries which might be dueto difference in the method of combat of iranian athletes with otherathletes.