其他摘要：Sports practice is not exempt of risks and each sport discipline presents a tendency for a specific type of injury inherent to its practice. The purpose of this study was to analyze and characterize the injuries occurred during the 2006/2007 season in all competitive Portuguese gymnasts. The sample was composed by 79 female artistic gymnasts, aged between 6-18 years and training on average 14.15 h/week. The injuries were categorized according to its etiology, type, anatomic distribution, severity and apparatus occurrence. As main results we point out: (i) 43% of the gymnasts were injured, with a 2.47 lesion rate in training and 1.95 in competition; (ii) the majority of injuries were traumatic (58.3%); (iii) the most common injury was the sprain (21.3%); (iv) lower limbs were the most affected (53.5%); (v) balance beam was the apparatus with the highest lesion incidence (19.7%). We may conclude that there is a visible trend in the nature of injuries both in terms of its etiology and anatomical location. The trend is also evident in relation to the influence of training load (h/week training and years of practice) in the injuries appearance.
