Hamstring injuries are one of the most common injuries in both individual and team sports. In sports such as soccer and football these injuries involve a traumatic pull of the muscle while sprinting or accelerating. After the initial healing phase athletes must rehabilitate the injury with Physical Therapy exercises to regain optimal muscle function and reduce their risk for future injury. Hamstring injuries often become recurrent if strength is not normalized along the hip, knee, and ankle muscles along the back of the leg. A new article highlights how these injuries also limit performance in sprinting trials.

Roksund and colleagues studied professional soccer players and collected data on previous hamstring injuries, as well as, each athlete’s strength, flexibility, aerobic capacity, and sprint performance (Front Physiol. 2017). Of the 75 athletes included in the study, 16% sustained a hamstring strain over the previous 2 years. The previously injured athletes demonstrated a significant loss of velocity during a 40 meter sprint test, as well as, a drop in performance over repeated sprints compared to their healthy peers. Interestingly, measures of flexibility, strength, aerobic capacity, and maximum power was not significantly different between groups. Injured athletes are encouraged to work with their local Physical Therapist to accelerate their recovery from muscle strains and eventual return to sport.

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