Article Text
Abstract
Introduction Hamstring muscle injuries (HMI) continue to plague professional football. Several scientific publications have encouraged a multifactorial approach; however, no multifactorial HMI risk reduction studies have been conducted in professional football. Furthermore, individualisation of HMI management programmes has only been researched in a rehabilitation setting. Therefore, this study aims to determine if a specific multifactorial and individualised programme can reduce HMI occurrence in professional football.
Methods and analysis We conducted a prospective cohort study over two seasons within the Finnish Premier League and compare the amount of HMI sustained during a control season to an intervention season. Injury data and sport exposure were collected during the two seasons (2019–2020), and a multifactorial and individualised HMI risk reduction programme will be implemented during intervention season (2020). After a hamstring screening protocol is completed, individual training will be defined for each player within several categories: lumbo-pelvic control, range of motion, posterior chain strength, sprint mechanical output and an additional non-individualised ‘training for all players’ category. Screening and respective updates to training programmes were conducted three times during the season. The outcome will be to compare if there is a significant effect of the intervention on the HMI occurrence using Cox regression analysis.
Ethics and dissemination Approval for the injury and sport exposure data collection was obtained by the Saint-Etienne University Hospital Ethics Committee (request number: IORG0007394; record number IRBN322016/CHUSTE). Approval for the intervention season was obtained from the Central Finland healthcare District (request and record number: U6/2019).
- Prevention
- Sprint
- Sports
- Hamstring
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Footnotes
Twitter Johan Lahti @lahti_johan.
Acknowledgements We would like to thank all the teams and players participating in this project. We thank Matt R. Cross for his input on the manuscript. We also would like to thank the following sprint coaches for their input to our training programme format: Håkan Andersson, Jonas Dodoo and Stuart McMillan.
Contributors JL, PE, JM and JBM conceived the idea behind the study and JA, LA, TK, MK, AM, VP, MT and R-MT provided advice on the study design. JL, JA, LA, TK, MK, AM, VP, MT and R-MT are responsible for data acquisition and data management. JL, PE, JM, JA and JBM are responsible for statistical analyses. JA, PE and JL developed the health-, injury-, study information-, coaching questionnaire- and consent forms with feedback from JBM, JM. JL is the corresponding author. All authors are entitled to explore the data set and publish on prespecified hypotheses. JL drafted the article, while all other authors revised the article for important intellectual content. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.
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