health and safety in sports

Sports

Playing sports helps you stay in shape, teaches you how to organize your time, boosts friendships and builds relationships with your peers and adults. Through athletics, you gain skills that can best be acquired on court, track or field.

• Friendship
• Family
• Coaches
• Health
• Sports Nutrition
• School
• Leadership Skills

Friendship

Playing sports enables you to create friendships you otherwise might not have formed. Sports bring teens together from different schools, backgrounds, and communities. Many times, the friendships you create on the field remain intact even when you are not playing sports.
 

Family

The fans on the sidelines are one of the most important parts of the game. The constant support of your parents helps you to feel good about yourself and strengthens your connection to them. As a teen, it is not always easy to find time to spend time with your parents. Sports give you and your parents time to appreciate one another.

 

Coaches

Providing wisdom and encouragement, coaches can be very good role models. The relationship that you develop with your coach is very important to the success of the team. Positive coaching helps to bring the team together, and gives players the right tools to push themselves academically and physically.
 

Health

Participating in sports improves your health in many ways. To be a good athlete, you must take care of yourself. This gets you thinking about what to eat and how to treat your body to achieve peak performance levels.
 

Sports Nutrition

When engaging in sports for the first time, you may feel hungrier than usual. This is normal, because your body is expending much more energy than it is used to. Here are some nutrition tips to help keep you healthy while you participate in sports.

• Eat fat. About 20 to 25 percent of energy comes from fats, so to keep energy levels high, your body needs you to consume fat.
• Make sure to eat before, during and after your sport. The helps maintain blood glucose levels, which in turn will help enhance your sports performance.
• Keep hydrated! When playing a sport, your body loses a lot of fluid, which can cause dehydration. This is dangerous, potentially fatal, so drink plenty of water.
• Eat a balanced diet. An athlete's diet should include plenty of complex carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, minerals and fats.
• Limit salt and simple sugar.
• Don't fast!

School

It's a common misconception that being both a student and an athlete is hard if not impossible. Participating in sports can actually have a positive impact on school. Sports force you to organize your time so that you can both go to practice and finish your homework. The key is finding a balance. If you can learn to organize your time then you can succeed in both.

Leadership Skills

Participating in sports helps build leadership skills. Sports teams give you an opportunity to surround yourself with competitive people and role models, and learn from them both. You can demonstrate your own leadership through team captainships and individual actions to improve your team's success.










Two new Safety in Sports Factsheets released:

• Safety in Sports: why is it time to act?
• Promoting Safety in Sports: how to put actions in place?

The millions of  sport-related injuries that are treated in emergency departments, take a annual share of 2 billion euro health care costs in the EU-region. The cost of lost productivity due to absence from work at least doubles this figure. By applying evidence based safety management programmes, sports organisation can reduce the number of injuries by at least one quarter by the year 2020. Less injuries will not only reduce the increasing costs of medical treatments but will make sport more attractive for people to join in, will keep players longer active within clubs and will enhance individual performance and team success.
We are looking forward to your sharing the annexed Factsheets with relevant colleagues and with organisations in the fields of sports, health promotion, sports and health insurances, sports medicine and physiotherapy, and to promote a wider take up of evidence based good practices.

        


Sports, health and quality of life are closely interconnected. We all need regular physical activity in order to function optimally and to prevent illnesses. Furthermore, living an active life brings many other social and psychological benefits. The social role of sports also has the potential to strengthen the European's external relations.
But certainly sporting also holds a risk of injury. It has to be taken into account that according to the IDB about eighteen percent of all injuries due to accidents result from these sporting activities.
The benefit for health could be significantly increased by reducing the frequency of sports injuries!