Holidays and leisure time are synonymous with fun and joie de vivre, rest and relaxation. Nobody wants to think about illness or accidents. But the reality is often different. According to a new representative survey by the BAT Leisure Research Institute, every third German citizen has had to seek medical treatment at least once in the last five years because they fell ill on holiday or were injured during leisure, sport or play.

Accident risks in recreational sports 

A lack of exercise at work, increased health awareness and more free time have turned sport into a mass movement among German citizens. The number of non-organised recreational athletes has increased significantly - as have the risks of accidents in sport.
20 % of all respondents mentioned injuries from ball games, tennis, athletics, jogging and winter sports. This means that over the last five years, one in five German citizens' sporting activities ended in the doctor's surgery. Extrapolated, this result means around 9.7 million sports injuries in just five years - a figure that seems quite realistic in view of the 1.5 million sports accidents registered in 1982 alone (Deutsches Ärzteblatt issue 9/1985).
Most injuries were sustained by fans of team sports (football, handball, volleyball, etc. 8 % of the responses). 5 % of the respondents in the BAT survey cited downhill and cross-country skiing, ice skating and tobogganing as the reason for injury, followed by tennis and jogging with 4 % and 3 % respectively.
Those who live a prestige-conscious life apparently live more dangerously: one in four executives (27 %) has had to see a doctor in the last five years because of a tennis injury, one in five because of an injury while winter sports (20 %) or jogging (18 %). This group is therefore well above the population average.
Riding bicycles and motorbikes poses an increased risk, especially for young people. While only one in 20 respondents cited this leisure activity as a reason for injury, this figure rose to one in seven among young people aged 16 to 19 (15%).

Causes, consequences and implications

"The specialist in leisure medicine will find a new field of activity in the future," says Prof Dr Opaschowski, head of the BAT Leisure Research Institute.
"Because there is still no competent medical advice on leisure activities, millions of Germans confuse the desire to exercise with the desire to exercise". Stressed out from work, they don't get to rest at the end of the day: not rested and relaxed enough, they plunge into the adventure of a holiday, swim along on every fitness wave, compete in fun runs and marathons or measure their strength in competitive sports. Fatigue, overestimation and overloading are the main causes of leisure accidents. Permanent damage to health can be the result.
Medicine now recognises around 70 leisure-related illnesses, with tennis elbow and golfer's elbow, jogger's knee and surfer's knot now sadly famous. At the same time, psychosomatic illnesses such as weekend neuroses and holiday depression, Sunday headaches and holiday migraines are on the rise. With more leisure time and holidays, medicine and the medical training of doctors are faced with new tasks of prevention and health maintenance.