About a third of injuries that knock professional soccer players off the field are muscle related, a Swedish study shows. Many of these are reinjuries that take longer to heal and might have been avoided with adequate recovery from the original injuries. Age and playing surface also have a role in which players suffer muscle injuries serious enough to put them on the bench, according to the report published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine. The researchers looked at the injuries of about 2,300 players in three European soccer leagues. On average, players had slightly more than one muscle injury severe enough to be "unable to fully participate in training or match play" for every two seasons. Each season, more than a third of the players missed a match or training session due to a muscle injury. Nine out of ten such injuries involved the big muscle groups in the legs: calf, hamstrings, quads, and the hip/groin area. These usually come from a player running or kicking, and not from when they hit another player.
Their findings have implications for teams' ability to reduce costly player down-time, they note in their report, urging further research into the specific causes of the most common muscle injuries to generate ideas for preventive measures.
Players aged 16 to 21 were less likely overall to get hurt than older players, especially to hurt their calves. For every 2,000 hours of play, younger players had about one calf strain, compared to almost four among players older than 30. Injuries were about six times more likely in games than during practice. This is in contrast to pro football, where half of the hamstring injuries happen in the pre-season. Only about a third of soccer injuries are from overuse. The majority come from a sudden pull or strain. About one in six players were reinjured, which means a recovery period up to 30 percent longer than with the first injury. The Swedish findings highlight the fact that trainers and players need to make sure they go through adequate rehab before heading back out on the field. Playing on newer generation artificial turf also seemed to reduce injuries compared with natural grass. SOURCE: bit.ly/f9eSBf The American Journal of Sports Medicine, online February 18, 2011.
