[♪ INTRO] ] Many, if not all, sports are inherently dangerous.

In boxing, for example, punching each other over and over again is going to cause some physical damage. But sports can affect athletes in so many more ways than first meets the eye.

Even graceful non-contact sports can be deceptively dangerous. From your toes to your head, here are five unexpected tolls that sports take on your body: Now on a daily basis, you probably don’t think about your big toe very often. But it’s required for things like walking and balancing.

Which is what brings turf toe to the list of sports dangers.v There are different degrees of injury that can all be classified as turf toe, but it’s a sprained or torn ligament. The tissue that connects the base of your big toe to your foot can get injured if you’re frequently putting on sudden bursts of pressure that overstretch it. This would happen if you went from a complete stop to a sprint or quickly changed directions.

And that’s a skill that American football players practice a lot. So it’s no surprise that they sometimes experience turf toe. These injuries aren’t exclusive to artificial playing surfaces, though.

It’s just called “turf toe” because football players experienced more of this type of injury when they switched from soft grass to harder turf. It’s not the turf itself so much as harder surfaces that contribute to turf toe. So reducing turf toe cases might be an argument for real grass instead of turf in stadiums.

But turf toe isn’t even specific to American football players. Sports like track and ballet are also turf toe magnets because participants push off the ground in unique ways that put incredible force on their big toes, and at extreme angles. Softer shoes also increase athletes’ risk of turf toe because they allow a greater range of motion.

So to combat this injury, a 2018 medical report recommends wearing shoes that don’t flex too much in the toes. But the good news is that resting turf toe injuries usually gives them time to heal on their own. Going from the bottom of the body all the way to the top, this next unexpected sporting danger is starting to get more recognition after years of neglect.

While it has an equally catchy name, sled head should be taken very seriously. It’s a term used to describe the concussions common in winter sports like luge, skeleton, and bobsleigh. They may look like smooth rides.

After all, you’re sliding on ice! But there’s a lot of rattling around from the high speed and curves that can lead to concussions. When your head hits something, like your sled, your brain can hit the inside of your skull with enough force to cause a concussion.

And sled sport athletes report symptoms of concussion with troubling frequency. A 1986 paper reported headaches, fogginess, and lack of equilibrium in luge athletes after a run, getting worse after more runs. Though not much research seems to have followed since then.

Even so, coaches and doctors for some downhill sports are beginning to suggest protective measures, like limiting the number of runs an athlete can complete per day and adding protective equipment like helmets and mouthguards. Since headaches also increased with bumpier tracks in that 1986 report, track maintenance may be helpful in reducing sled head instances. While more research is needed to see how these precautions impact the rates of sled head, some change in the sport is definitely needed, because these sports have accumulated some troubling stats.

Winter Olympic sports have greater injury rates than the summer Olympic sports, thanks to all those fast downhill courses. And of the winter sports, sledding sports take the gold for number of injuries, coming in at 26% of winter Olympic injuries at the high end. Recreational sledders can travel up to 40 kilometers per hour, and even at those speeds, brain injuries can occur.

And professional athletes are going twice as fast! At this point, there are still relatively few formal investigations of sled head, so athletes are calling for more research. For now, the literature seems to suggest wearing a helmet and going down a smooth path are the best ways to limit injury.

But sled head isn’t the only injury on ice to make it on this list. Because spending a ton of time at indoor ice rinks comes with health risks you might not expect – at least if they’re not maintained correctly. Hazardous gasses like carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide can sometimes be found in ice rinks.

Nitrogen dioxide can react with water to produce nitric acid in your lungs. Low level exposures can cause respiratory irritation, such as coughing, while more extreme cases can cause fluid to accumulate in the lungs. Carbon monoxide, meanwhile, gets in the way of oxygen sticking to red blood cells.

In the most extreme cases, this causes suffocation. But how much carbon monoxide you breathe in is an important factor. The authors of one study suggest that mild cases might be more common in ice rinks than we realize.

Low levels of exposure can lead to milder symptoms like lightheadedness. But you might be wondering what these gasses are doing in ice rinks in the first place. It’s the work of none other than the charmingly innocent Zamboni.

After all, they’re basically just big trucks that you drive around inside. And that’s all fine and dandy when there’s really good air circulation and ventilation, but that’s not always the case. In North America, there have only been around a dozen documented instances in which ice rinks were so under-ventilated that patrons experienced acute symptoms.

However, milder symptoms have also been reported. You could experience small amounts of exposure to Zamboni exhaust as headaches, nausea, and disorientation, while a higher dose can lead to more acute symptoms. And one international study found that nitrogen dioxide levels were above safe limits in 40% of the ice rinks they looked at.

Luckily for more frequent skaters, outdoor ice doesn’t come with the same risks. Now, the injuries so far have come from participating in sports. But this next danger comes up when athletes stop participating.

Although it’s really when they start again after stopping. Historically, there have been several reasons for suddenly shutting down a training season. For example, in 2011, the National Football League shut down part of the American football season over a collective bargaining agreement.

And of course there’s COVID-19. COVID-related pauses affected athletes in sports from football to baseball to the Olympics. In 2020, Major League Baseball reported about double the injuries compared to the previous two seasons.

A study out of the University of Kentucky concluded these injuries were likely the result of inadequate training. In the same way, the football lockout of 2011 forced athletes to work with an expedited training season, cramming 14 weeks of training into 17 days. And this led to an unprecedented number of Achilles tendon ruptures that season.

Your Achilles tendon is the fibrous tissue that connects your calf muscles to the heel of your foot. When you increase the stress on your Achilles tendon and overstretch it, it can tear. Tears even tend to happen in the same place.

There’s a spot just above your heel where the Achilles tendon has to stretch the most when you use it, and so tears or ruptures tend to happen there. It’s kind of like how pizza dough will break at its weak spots if you try to stretch it too fast. Gradually working your way to the desired output is less likely to result in tears.

In the end, about one third of these injuries are career enders for NFL players. But this is often preventable, and athletes can generally avoid it by working in enough training time. There’s one more injury that can be shared between professional and amateur athletes.

Because it’s not so much a sporting risk, as plain old human nature. If you celebrate your sporting triumphs just a little too hard, even that can lead to injury. A lot of the time, all it takes is literally jumping with joy.

Just ask these NFL players: Cardinals kicker Bill Gramatica, Georgia wide receiver Malcom Mitchell, Lions linebacker Stephen Tulloch, and Bears defensive end Lamarr Houston, who all tore their anterior cruciate ligaments, or ACLs, from celebratory jumps that landed wrong. The ACL is a ligament that stabilizes the knee and connects your femur to your tibia, behind the kneecap. It can tear from sudden stress, similar to the Achilles tendon.

When you jump, you’re putting a lot of concentrated strain on your joints, especially on your knees. The human knee can handle over 12 times your body weight when jumping, so you could give 11 of you a piggyback ride and your knee could still handle the impact. But it depends on how you land.

When you land with bent legs, your leg muscles and bones absorb the shock from hitting the ground. But landing on straight legs puts more of that load on your knees and can lead to injury. Exercise, stretching, and proper jumping technique may help athletes avoid these celebration downfalls, though nothing can really prevent them from just… landing wrong.

So please, enjoy your victories responsibly. If you’re trying to get some exercise into your life, proper technique and equipment can go a long way in preventing some of these unexpected injuries. Thanks for watching this episode of Scishow and thanks as always to the coolest kids on the block, our patrons Your generous support makes it possible for us to bring these videos to everyone for free If you’d like to get started you can go to Patreon.com/Scishow Thank you for watching! [♪ OUTRO]