We’ve been seeing more abdominal injuries over the past 10 years. The term that came out of them—sports hernia—really doesn’t tell us much, if anything, about the injuries. That’s because the injury isn’t a hernia but a tear, or overstretch, of the rectus abdominis muscle.
The injury started to be recognized in the late 1980’s and only recently is being readily acknowledged. The two sports with the most prevalent ab tears are hockey and soccer, even though they’re seen in football and basketball, and I’ve seen cases in weightlifting and marathon running. The reason I decided to address it is a recent case of a weight trainee who has been dealing with the symptoms for three years.
The trainee stated he felt the pain shortly after performing crunches. He said he was performing three sets of 70. That certainly didn’t seem to be enough to cause the injury. Still, he became unable to run due to his abdominal pain.
As it turned out, the trainee had suffered a right shoulder injury, which prevented him from performing much of his upper-body training. So he’d been concentrating his time and energy on ab training. He was performing flat crunches, crunches across a Swiss ball, side crunches and several other exercises. He’d suddenly increased his volume of ab training, added new exercises and wasn’t getting much recovery. The result was that he tore his rectus abdominis.
