Information about a piece of news titled New warm-up program for football players can reduce injury risk by 50%
New warm-up program for football players can reduce injury risk by 50%
Intoduction
A new Norwegian study published in the prestigious British Medical Journal shows that a 20 minutes warm-up program developed by the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center in collaboration with FIFA significantly reduces injury risk in female youth football players.
John Brooks, a sports injury expert put the study’s results in perspective: “The wider sporting population at all levels should adopt this warm-up programme to reduce injury in all sports”.
Read BMJ's press release which accompanies the study paper.
”The 11+” is a 20 min structured warm-up program consisting of running, neuromuscular and strength training exercises focusing on improving strength, awareness, and neuromuscular control, and thereby aimed to prevent the most common lower limb injuries in football: sprain injuries to the ankle and knee, and strain injuries to the thigh and groin.
In the 2007 football season, a total of 125 teams from the southern, eastern and middle part of Norway, approximately 2500 14-16 year-old girls, were asked to participate in this project. Half of the teams were asked to use “The 11+” as a warm-up program throughout the 8-months season (intervention group), while the other half of the teams were asked to continue their usual training habits (control group).
Throughout the season, injuries and players´ individual exposure to training and match play were registered, in addition to individual compliance of the players to “The 11+”.
At the end of the season, the results showed that injuries overall were reduced by 32% and that serious injuries and overuse injuries were reduced even more, by 45% and 53%, respectively.
It is also noteworthy that the players with high compliance with “The 11+” experienced a risk reduction of 35% compared to those players with intermediate compliance with “The 11+”.
This project has shown that injury preventive training may be very effective, specifically so in players who train “The 11+” at least 2-3 times weekly.
“The 11+” can be customized and employed with equivalent benefits in similar sports such as basketball, team handball, and volleyball, and in players as young as 10-12 years.
PhD student Torbjørn Soligard from the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center was the principal investigator of this project. He also serves as the primary contact person for all inquiries.
Other staff involved were Grethe Myklebust, Kathrin Steffen, Ingar Holme, Roald Bahr and Thor Einar Andersen, all from the OSTRC, Astrid Junge, Mario Bizzini and Jiri Dvorak from the FIFA Medical Assessment and Research Centre (F-MARC, Swiss), and Holly Silvers from the Santa Monica Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Research Foundation (USA).
Watch the warm-up program of ”The 11+” .
Read the paper in British Medical Journal.