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Correspondence to Dr Martin Wollin, Department of Physical Therapies, Australian Institute of Sport, Belconnen, Australian Capital Territory 2617, Australia; [email protected]
Introduction
Despite the resources applied to the prevention of hamstring injuries in sport, between 2001 and 2014 the hamstring injury incidence and burden did not decline in male professional football.1 2 Consideration of alternative and complementary prevention strategies are needed.3 One-time only preseason screening for hamstring injury risk factors has limited value for preventing hamstring injuries.4 In-season monitoring of hamstring function has been advocated as a secondary prevention strategy.3 Since a player’s isometric knee flexion strength may decrease before suffering a hamstring strain (HS) injury,5 regular hamstring strength monitoring may be valuable. In-season monitoring can ensure players have restored hamstring muscle strength after the demands of a match and prior to undertaking high workloads in training or playing another match. Identifying a post-match impairment (‘subclinical stage of injury’),6 7 allows for early intervention and may be a practical way to lower susceptibility of hamstring injury (online supplementary material figure 1).
In this letter, we report our proof-of-concept hamstring injury prevention system that incorporated secondary prevention for hamstring injury in football. We also compared the occurrence and burden of hamstring injury in a cohort where secondary prevention was implemented in addition to standard practice (primary and tertiary prevention).
Methods
The sample in this cohort study consisted of male U17 football players who commenced training at the Australian football association’s centre of excellence programme. Fifty-two players from the programme during April 2014 to August 2017 formed the intervention group and undertook regular in-season hamstring strength monitoring. Data from a further 22 players in the immediately preceding cohort (December 2012 to March 2014), during their final month in...