- Let's talk about those young athletes right now, and what are some of the things you're seeing in them?

What are some of the more common injuries?

- One of the ones that happens almost year-round is ankle sprains, and there's a really varied level of comfort, it seems to me, like in the primary care community, primary care doctor's offices, how comfortable some of those practitioners are, providers are, in treating and evaluating those kinds of things.

But we see a lot of those and are pretty well versed in how to treat those.

So we get a lot of those.

There's always the things like, you know, "I was taking the dog out, and dog saw a squirrel, and leash was wrapped around my leg.

And he took off, and my leg twisted funny and felt a pop and couldn't put weight on it," come in to see me for that, so, twisted knees, sprains, things like that in the knees.

There's everything from head to toe, though.

- Sure, and with the athletes, there's always freak accidents out there, but do you see athletes that come in that maybe they didn't stretch enough, or they didn't warm up or cool down, and that's how they're getting some of these injuries?

- That's an interesting thing that you mentioned.

So not that it really makes a huge difference once somebody has an injury, but I think there's been this emphasis, at least ever since I was younger, this emphasis in stretching.

And in gym class when I was a kid, we would all do, we call static stretching, where you sit on the floor, and you reach down towards your toes, and then you reach over this way, and you stretch this way, and you stretch that way.

Before you did any kind of activity, you always had to stretch first.

And there's been some more research been done over the last 10, 20 years that's actually showing that static stretching, especially cold muscles, could in some cases actually increase the rates of injuries like sprains and strains, pulled muscles, things like that.

And really, I think the most important thing is sort of a dynamic warm-up.

That's what I usually recommend to my athletes, is doing a dynamic warm-up, where you're doing a brisk walk or a light jog or something like that before you get into whatever the intense exercise you're gonna do.

It's weightlifting, or it's CrossFit, or it's hybrid workouts or running, whatever the case may be.

Do a little dynamic warm-up to get your muscles and tendons and your joints primed for that kind of activity and really leave some of the stretching for once everything's nice and warm and sort of loosened up already so you're not gonna give yourself an injury at the time that you were actually trying to prevent getting an injury.

- And one of the things that we've seen this past fall