Sports Hernia

Sports hernias are an interesting finding. There isn’t actually a great definition for a sports hernia but generally speaking, when an athlete develops pain (and the classic example is a hockey player who strains their leg or their groin – they develop pain, a sharp pain that occurs in their groin) and when you run all these tests, you often can’t find anything that’s wrong. You can’t feel a hernia. When you do an MRI or an ultrasound, you don’t see a hernia. But in fact, they continue to have pain. Oftentimes what you find is that the insertion of the muscle that is onto the bone has become torn and that’s what’s causing the pain. That is often what we consider a sports hernia, which is different from a traditional hernia.