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  • Still poorly adopted in male professional football: but teams that used the Nordic Hamstring Exercise in team training had fewer hamstring injuries – a retrospective survey of 17 teams of the UEFA Elite Club Injury Study during the 2020–2021 season

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Still poorly adopted in male professional football: but teams that used the Nordic Hamstring Exercise in team training had fewer hamstring injuries – a retrospective survey of 17 teams of the UEFA Elite Club Injury Study during the 2020–2021 season
  1. Jan Ekstrand1,2,
  2. Håkan Bengtsson1,2,
  3. Markus Walden1,2,
  4. Michael Davison2,3,
  5. Martin Hagglund1,2
  1. 1Department of Health, Medicine and Caring Sciences, Linköping University, Linkoping, Sweden
  2. 2Department of Health, Medicine and Caring Sciences, Football Research Group, Linköping, Sweden
  3. 3FIFA Medical Centre of Excellence, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Jan Ekstrand; jan.ekstrand{at}telia.com

Abstract

Objectives The primary objective was to study the adoption of the NHE programme in European football teams in the 2020/21 season and to compare it to the previous study. A second objective was to compare hamstring injury rates between teams that used the NHE programme in the team training and teams that used the NHE only for players with previous or current hamstring injuries.

Methods Data about the implementation of the NHE programme and injury rates were included for 17 teams participating in the Elite Club Injury Study during the 2020/2021 season.

Results One team (6%) used the full original NHE programme, and another four teams used it for all or most players in the team (team training group, n=5). Eleven teams used NHE only for players with a previous or current hamstring injury (individual training group), and one team did not use NHE. The team training group had fewer hamstring injuries (5 vs 11 per team, p=0.008) and a lower injury burden (12 vs 35 lay-off days per 1000 hours, p=0.003) than the individual training group.

Conclusion Similar to previous reports, low adoption of the NHE programme was seen in the 2020/2021 season. The low adoption rate (13%) relates to the number of teams fully or partly using NHE programmes. Teams that used NHE for the whole team or most players had a lower hamstring injury burden than teams that used NHE only for individual players.

  • training
  • injury
  • epidemiology
  • muscle damage/injuries

Data availability statement

No data are available. No data available due to confidentiality promised to participants and teams.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjsem-2022-001368

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    Data availability statement

    No data are available. No data available due to confidentiality promised to participants and teams.

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    Footnotes

    • Contributors JE was responsible for the conception of the study. The survey questions were reviewed by JE, HB, MH and MW. JE distributed the survey, and responses were collected by JE and MD. HB conducted the analyses, which were planned and checked with JE. JE wrote the first draft, which was critically revised by HB, MW, MH and MD. All authors contributed to the interpretation of findings and approved the final manuscript. JE is the study guarantor.

    • Funding This study was supported by grants from UEFA.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.