Objective: A review was conducted to present current views and effectiveness of prevention and rehabilitation methods of hamstring injuries.
Methods: a review searching on the electronic data bases, including Proquest, Medline, Sport Discus, Cinahl plus, Health source Nursing / Academic edition, Academic search complete, Pub med and Scholar Google. Only randomized control studies ( R C T ’ S were included) which contained the intervention and control groups concerning either the prevention or rehabilitation of hamstrings.
Results: Fourteen randomized control studies were included. Twelve concerned the prevention and two the rehabilitation of hamstring injuries. From the analysis of the articles concerning prevention we concluded that stretching, especially static and warm up program named “ The 11” did not show any benefits in preventing hamstring injuries whilst strength training exercises with eccentric contraction (Nordic exercises) and warm-up program “The 11+” containing eccentric exercises of hamstring showed significant differences regarding the prevention. It is postulated that the effectiveness of this may be due to the fact that the researchers had targeted the progressive increase in the intensity and frequency of eccentric exercises.
Conclusions: Eccentric exercises seem (based on the findings included in this study) to have an important role in the prevention and strengthening immediately after hamstring injury and also significantly role on reducing the risk of reinjury. A rehabilitation program that includes mainly stretching exercises with eccentric loading of hamstrings muscles and secondly an exercise program which includes core stability and progressive agility exercises were found to be the most effective for recovery after hamstrings injury.
