Sport climbing has been blossoming for the last few years, especially after it became an Olympic sport. The number of climbing gyms and areas is growing, as well as the number of climbers. The style of climbing is changing and getting more difficult, leading to an increased load on the human body. The result are sport specific injuries. In Master's thesis we were interested in shoulder injuries in sport climbing, reasons for their occurrence and how we could prevent them. For that purpose, we reviewed domestic and foreign literature, carried out systematic review of existing scientific articles and interviewed advanced climbers who have recently injured their shoulder while climbing.
Our finding is that shoulder injuries are becoming more common and represent averagely 17,4 % of all injuries that occur at sport climbing, of which SLAP lesion and impingement syndrome are the most frequent two. We also discovered that climbers often suffer from bad posture, which is a consequence of both physical loads present during climbing and muscle imbalances, and represents a risk factor of developing a shoulder injury. Therefore, we made a shoulder injury prevention program, oriented to fix a bad posture and develop proper muscle balance and stability of the shoulder.
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