Injury narratives in sport: a comprehensive review of qualitative studies.

Injury is rarely just a physical event, and this review asks what athletes and the people around them actually experience when it happens. The authors pulled together thirty-five qualitative studies spanning different sports and levels of competition, looking at how injuries are perceived, discussed, managed, and sometimes hidden. Across this body of work, five recurring themes emerged: risk factors like heavy training loads and psychosocial stress, the wide-ranging consequences of injury including financial and emotional strain, the mixed experience of rehabilitation, the tendency for pain and injury to go unreported because of fear or cultural pressure, and the practical barriers to prevention such as limited resources and packed schedules. What makes this interesting is the consistency of these patterns across very different sporting contexts, suggesting injury is shaped as much by culture and relationships as by biomechanics.

The main limitation is that this is a synthesis of existing qualitative studies, so it describes shared experiences and perceptions rather than proving what causes injuries or what prevents them.

If you've ever played sport and gotten hurt, you probably know that the injury itself is only part of the story. This review looked at thirty-five qualitative studies, meaning research based on interviews and detailed conversations with athletes and people who support them like coaches and medical staff, to understand what injury actually feels like to live through. Across these studies, people described similar struggles: pushing through heavy training without enough recovery, feeling pressure to hide pain rather than report it for fear of losing their spot on a team, and finding rehabilitation isolating unless they had good support around them.

Financial strain and emotional distress came up again and again, alongside frustration when resources or time for proper recovery were limited. This research doesn't measure or prove what causes injuries or how to prevent them. Instead, it gathers common threads from people's lived experiences, which can help us understand the human side of injury, but it can't tell us what any individual athlete should do differently.

This is a summary of research, not medical advice. Talk to your own healthcare provider about anything affecting your care.

This systematic review synthesized qualitative data from thirty-five studies, registered prospectively and appraised using the CASP checklist, to characterize athlete and stakeholder experiences of sports injury across risk, consequence, rehabilitation, reporting, and prevention domains. Thematic analysis identified consistent patterns: risk perceived to be driven by training load, inadequate recovery, early specialization, and psychosocial stress; consequences spanning performance disruption, long-term disability, financial burden, and psychological distress; rehabilitation experienced as burdensome when self-managed but improved with interdisciplinary support; underreporting linked to normalization of pain, fear of deselection, and cultural pressure; and prevention constrained by resource limitations and fixture congestion. As a qualitative evidence synthesis, this work offers insight into experience, context, and barriers rather than effect estimates, and cannot establish causal relationships between risk factors and injury occurrence or demonstrate that any intervention reduces injury.

The strength lies in the breadth of thirty-five studies across sports and competitive levels, offering convergent themes on disclosure barriers and biopsychosocial complexity. The main limitation is heterogeneity inherent to qualitative synthesis and reliance on self-reported perceptions, meaning findings should inform understanding of lived experience and implementation context rather than clinical decision-making.