You’re heading home on a Friday afternoon. Tomorrow is Saturday, and you know how you’re going to spend it. Maybe you’ve got a mean tennis match set up. Maybe you’re going to play golf all day.
Maybe you’ll run those five miles that you never seem to have time for during the work week.
It’s Monday and you’re back at the office. And you’re hurting.
Welcome to the world of the weekend warrior. Part-time athletes who play hard once in a while find themselves prone to something doctors call the “overuse syndrome.”
“They’re problems that result from doing too much in too short of a time,” said Dr. Fred Turner, a Naples, Fla., orthopedic surgeon.
Weekend warriors may be plagued by tendinitis or bursitis. First, a quick lesson in anatomy: Tendons are tissue that connect muscles to bones. The bursa is a potential space between two layers of tissue. The bursa may be found between a tendon and a bone, a tendon and a tendon or a muscle or a bone.
“Itis” means inflammation. So tendinitis and bursitis are inflammations of those areas.
If you’re exercising hard, you run the risk of irritating the bursa area. The body’s response is to fill the area with fluid, producing a sac, Turner said. Common sites for bursitis are the shoulder, elbow, hip, knee or ankle.
Tendinitis also occurs in response to overuse or injury. Baseball players, swimmers, tennis players or golfers may get tendinitis in their shoulders or arms. Soccer and basketball players, runners and aerobic dancers can get it in their legs and feet.
“Basically, every sport has its own vulnerable part of the anatomy,” said Dr. Peter Indelicato, professor of orthopedic surgery and director of sports medicine for the University of Florida.
Redness and swelling may accompany tendinitis and bursitis, depending on the location, said Indelicato. It depends on the location of the injury, he said. If the injury is superficial, there may be redness and swelling. If the injury is deep, there will be an achy type of pain, he said.
To treat bursitis and tendinitis, your first step should be to rest the area. Ibuprofin can be used to control inflammation and block pain.
Put ice on the injury, Turner said. But don’t just set a bag of ice on the area. All that does is make the surface area cold. Instead, Turner tells people to use ice massage. Fill Styrofoam coffee cups with water and freeze them. Peel about an inch down from the top, and press the ice on the area. Then, move it slowly in circles, enough to expand the area you’re targeting.
“That has been shown to increase the penetration of cold tenfold,” Turner said. “. . . cold is the most potent stimulus to stop inflammation that we have.”
So put away the heating pad. Heat isn’t usually an option, Indelicato said. It enhances the swelling that you’re trying to avoid. But elevation is good, Turner said. Keep the injured area above your heart. Compression, using an Ace bandage, also may help.
Another overuse syndrome injury is a stress fracture. These are tiny breaks in a bone that can be picked up on a bone scan. Someone with a stress fracture may feel pain when putting weight on a bone or pain in a specific area. Treatment for this is immobilization, Turner said.
Prevention is still the best medicine.
“The most common way and the best way of preventing (injury) would be to get into a fitness program very gradually,” Indelicato said.
Weekday couch potatoes shouldn’t try to cram a week’s worth of exercise into two days, Indelicato said.
“Really, weekend warriors who are basically sedentary during the week are the ones who shouldn’t do much during the weekend,” he said. “They’re the ones who are very vulnerable to these kinds of things.”
But a week’s worth of the same exercise may also cause injury. That’s why Turner advocates cross-training. Alternate activities so you alternate stress on areas of your body, he said.
The “no pain, no gain” saying is misleading, Turner said. The pain that phrase is referring to is the pain you get from being out of breath or tired. The pain from an injury is acute, and should not be ignored.
Take it slow, Turner said. He recommends a walking program for everyone, especially those just beginning to exercise.
Stretching before exercise is another prevention measure. Many people still neglect the importance of stretching before and after a workout. Gentle stretching could make a difference.
And what about those sore muscles that follow the pickup football game on Sunday afternoon? Can doctors help the person who can barely lean over to tie his shoes on Monday?
“I’m afraid not,” Indelicato said. “You may want to take some Advil or ibuprofin. Fortunately, those things just last a day or two.”
