Skateboarding Safely

Proper precautions can keep extreme fun injury-free

Safely airborne—Caitlin Frey, 17, of Allentown (in both photos) has fun at the Catasauqua Recreation Center while demonstrating that protective gear can keep you from getting injured.

Tricks like jumping and freefalling (“ollies” and “acid drops,” as boarders call them) make skateboarding look dangerous. And it can be—Lehigh Valley Hospital treated 19 skateboarding trauma cases in the last two years, including a young child with a fractured skull and several teens struck by cars.

As skateboarding has boomed in popularity, the national injury rate has doubled since the mid- 1990s. “Most cases are wrist fractures that can be treated with a cast or splint,” says Barry Berger, M.D., an orthopedic surgeon at the hospital. Other common injuries include broken or sprained ankles and skin abrasions.

But skateboarding is not necessarily more dangerous than other sports. Studies suggest injury rates are actually lower than in basketball, football and biking. “And skateboarding has a lot of health pluses,” says Berger’s colleague, adolescent medicine physician Sarah Stevens, M.D. “It’s fun and exciting, and it gets kids out burning energy, working their muscles and being with friends instead of sitting on the couch.”

Despite the sport’s outlaw reputation, most skateboarders aren’t troublemakers, she says. And reckless behavior such as “skitching”—skating at high speed by hitching onto a car—is rare among local teens, according to Brian Parish, faculty advisor for the skateboard club at Emmaus High School. “Like serious participants in any sport, most skateboarders focus on fundamentals,” he says.

The key to safe skateboarding is to minimize dangers by taking these basic precautions:

Follow age-based rules. Keep children younger than 5 off skateboards. “Most kids that young aren’t developmentally coordinated enough to stand on a skateboard without falling,” Stevens says. Between ages 5 and 10, children should skateboard only under adult supervision.

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Published from Healthy You Magazine, July-August 2008

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