Content area
Full text
Correspondence to Dr Jeppe Bo Lauersen, Department of Sports Medicine, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, Oslo 0863, Norway; [email protected]
Introduction
Exercise constitutes a cornerstone in the quality of life of recreational athletes, prevention of metabolic and frailty syndromes and in the worldwide elite sports entertainment business.1 2 Effective prevention of sports injuries, as the sole prevalent adverse effect of physical activity, could potentially benefit a wide spectrum of individuals involved in any form of exercise.3–6 While the management of sports injuries can be troublesome, time-consuming and expensive, prevention in the form of strength training has proved to be accessible, effective and cost-effective for populations.7–11 However, research has yet to establish fundamental strength training prevention mechanisms and parameters for optimization.
In 2013, Lauersen et al 7 quantitatively compared the preventive effects of different types of exercise programmes: strength training, proprioception, stretching and multicomponent interventions. The obvious next step would be a further description and qualitative analysis of these four intervention types. However, several reviews have satisfactorily analysed both proprioception and stretching studies,12–15 while multicomponent programmes have proved problematic to analyse qualitatively due to their complex nature.16 17 Therefore strength training, which proved the most effective, represented the logical progression and, to our knowledge, existing strength training research has primarily focused on biomolecular aspects, fall prevention in the elderly, general health gains or specific musculoskeletal injuries. Analysis of study design and execution, content of strength training interventions, injury outcomes, intervention safety and extraction of potential general prevention principles should enable the formulation of clinically relevant conclusions and best evidence recommendations for both contemporary prevention programmes and future research. As the current literature and guidelines are not fully developed, the aims of this review were to systematically identify and analyse qualitatively and quantitatively randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of strength training-based sports injury prevention programmes.
Methods
Search strategy, study selection and qualitative analyses
A review protocol was registered in PROSPERO (CRD42015006970) in September 2015 (see online supplement section §1), comprising a priori specification of analyses, study inclusion/exclusion criteria (table 1), injury definitions for study selection (see online supplement section §2)18 19 and complete search strategy (see online supplement section §3). The PubMed, Embase, Web of Science and SPORTDiscus electronic databases were updated...