After taking a few decent knocks myself, I started working with a research agency to create a survey on Foiling Injuries. I know there has been a bit of chat in the forums here about various injuries, and the latest episode with Andrew Sayre was an eye-opener and a great catalyst for injury prevention discussions.
Your feedback will help us and the broader foiling community understand the risks and work toward making foiling safer for everyone. The survey is quick, anonymous, and open to all skill levels—wing foilers, e-foilers, surf foilers, downwind etc. Whether you’ve had an injury or not, I would love to hear from you as every response counts.
Once I have sufficient responses, I will publish some of the key findings. The goal is to understand bigger trends and opportunities for preventing injuries in foiling.
I am more than happy to have a chat with anyone who has feedback or questions. Also, a huge thanks to those in the community who have helped me get this ready!
One issue is that we only hear about the mishaps. I haven’t yet been injured foiling after more than 7 years of continuous foil-brain. How will you collect information on sessions without an issue?
Hey @jondrums, yep you are correct. Understanding how often injuries occur (and don’t occur) is key. I don’t want to taint these comments with my thoughts on this as I would rather wait and see what the data says, but I would like to be able to compare the reported injury rates to that of compatible sports like surfing where existing studies have already been done.
The survey is about understanding foiling injuries, but I strongly encourage all foilers to complete it, as getting data from those who have not been injured is also really important.
I think comparisons with skiing and mountainbiking would provide a good perspective…but need data to start to get something for that comparison…I appreciate the work!
I agree, there is a lot of crossover in those two sports with the people who I foil with. Keeping a survey as short as possible while getting useful data is a bit of a juggle, but there are many more areas I would like to explore in future versions of this research.
I have visited the hospital for mountain biking, skiing and foiling so my personal experience is a bit warped, but I am looking forward to seeing and sharing the data from a wider audience.
Yes, I will share it in any FB groups I am in after a few days. Progression Forum gets to be my soft launch, and so far no issues
Please feel free to share this with anyone or any groups you think may be interested. I am in a few Australian & North American groups but nothing European so I could do with some help or at least suggestions of groups to reach out to.
After taking the survey, I think there are some potential issues with the survey design (mainly forced-choice for many answers that could be check boxes. Also, seemingly critically, there is no detailed follow up questions on injuries themselves … for example - I have been moderately to severely injured (took a stab through my foot requiring stitches, on crutches for 5-6 weeks!) - but there is no opportunity to speak to how that injury happened (risk by discipline), over how many hours of total foiling time (injury rate), and whether the precautions taken pre/post have influenced behavior or buying patterns (market feasibility for new products, etc).
Hi @EmeryThrill, thanks for the feedback. There are comment boxes in the injury section to add any notes about the injury not covered in the questions, but I will review these and see if they are sufficient in the next version of the survey.
There is a lot more I would like to ask also, especially your comments on risk by discipline, injury rates etc, however I felt that the survey was already quite long and I would prefer to get a larger volume of complete responses than a smaller number of more detailed responses at this stage. I plan to follow this up in the future with a modified survey once initial trends are identified and we can see the obvious areas for further research.
I really appreciate you taking the time to do the survey and provide so much feedback!
After less than a week, I am stoked to have already had over 150 responses, and I am pretty sure most of them have come from this forum. I am excited to get my researcher to play with the data and share some initial insights…
Thanks again to everyone who has completed or shared the survey!
