Sports injuries occur during participation in sports or exercise in general. Globally, around 40% of individuals engage in some form of regular exercise or organized sports, with upwards of 60% of US high school students participating in one or more sports. Sports injuries account for 15 - 20% of annual acute care visits with an incidence of 1.79 - 6.36 injuries per 1,000 hours of participation. Sports injuries can be broken down into the types of injuries, risk factors and prevention and the overall impact that injuries have on athletes.

The type of sports injury suffered varies greatly based on gender, age and sport. Nonetheless, those with the highest prevalence remain contusions, fractures and sprains, followed closely by wounds and overuse injuries. Also common, the possible severity of head and neck injuries are important to consider. It is also paramount to place emphasis on the specific injuries that are most commonly encountered by sports medicine specialists.

Soft tissue injuries can be divided into those that affect the connective tissue (such as the skin), ligaments, tendons, or muscles. Injuries affecting the integument or the skin, can be classified as contusions, abrasions, and lacerations. Contusions or bruises are the simplest and most common injuries and are usually a result of blunt force trauma. Severe contusions may involve deeper structures and can include nerve or vascular injury. Abrasions are superficial injuries to the skin that result from a shearing force and are no deeper than the most superficial tissue layer, the epidermis. Bleeding, when present, is minimal. Minor abrasions generally do not scar, but deeper abrasions generally bleed and may scar. Lacerations occur from blunt trauma and result in a puncture through the skin, leaving an open wound. Facial lacerations are the most variable of the soft tissue injuries that athletes can sustain. They can occur intraoral or extraoral, and vary from a superficial skin nick to a lip laceration, or involve significant vascular disruption or injury to collateral vital structures.

Another major set of soft tissue injuries are those that affect the tendons and ligaments involved in the function of weight bearing joints. Of the various ligament and tendon injuries sustained during sports, those that hold particular importance for sports medicine providers due to their high prevalence are described in the following table:

Types of hard tissue injuries can include dental and bone injuries and are less frequent than soft tissue injuries in sport, but are often more serious. Hard tissue injuries to teeth and bones can occur with contusions, such as Battle sign, which indicates basilar skull fracture, and so-called raccoon eyes, which indicate midface fractures. However, tooth fractures are the most common type of tooth injury, and can be categorized as crown infractions, enamel-only fracture, enamel-dentin fractures, and fractures that extend through the enamel and dentin into the pulp which is defined below.

In addition to tooth fractures, there are several types of bone fractures as well. These types being closed or simple, open or compound, greenstick, hairline, complicated, comminuted, avulsion, and compression. A complicated fracture is when the structures surrounding the fracture are injured, such as blood vessels, organs, nerves, etc.

Overuse injuries can be defined as injuries that result from a mechanism of repetitive and cumulative micro-trauma, that exceeds tissue repair capacity. Overuse injuries can be divided into three primary categories, tendinopathy, stress reaction and stress fractures, and Juvenile Osteochondritis Dissecans. Tendinopathy is the result of accumulative micro-trauma and degenerative changes to the tissue that can predispose to pain and even rupture with activity. Tendinopathy progresses in stages from tendinitis which is inflammatory driven, to later tendinosis which is primarily degenerative. The lack of inflammation in this later stage is in fact what hinders the bodies ability to heal the injury. Stress reaction and stress fractures occur due to accumulative trauma to bone that leads to a imbalance between bone cleavage and replacement leaving the bone prone to micro-damage (stress reactions) and stress fractures.

A common cause for both these types of injuries are increase in training frequency and can be associated with poor technique, or other external factors like training on hard surfaces or long distance sports. Finally, the rapid changes in physical growth in children leave them prone to overuse injuries, especially Juvenile Osteochonditis Dissecans, in which the bone-cartilage interface is affected. This disease is driven primarily by repetitive micro-trauma sustained while training and can lead to pain in the affected joints. The disease predominately affects athletes undergoing rapid periods of growth, therefore as the athlete's bodies continues to mature, the disease tends to self-resolve.