Are Appropriately Designed and Dosed Eccentrics part of your Early Treatment Plan?
Not even 25 minutes into the opening game of the 2018 World Cup, Russian midfielder Alan Dzagoev pulled his hamstring.
The prevalence of hamstring injuries during soccer match play remains high. It has been reported that sprinting-type hamstring injuries might be related to insufficient eccentric hamstring strength. Recurrent injury rates remain equally high and might be related to inadequate rehabilitation and too early return to play.
Inclusion of the Nordic hamstring exercise has showed promise in reducing occurrence rates in professional soccer players. However, due to the high torque/force requirements to perform the Nordic exercise, it is mainly used in prevention and in the later phases of rehabilitation.
With appropriate design and dosing we can introduce eccentrics early on in the rehabilitation treatment plan and therefore be more effective in preparing the tissue for its task. Appropriate design considerations include:
- Where to place maximum external peak torque?
- Eliminating the concentric phase
- Open and closed chain, depending on the injury mechanism
About the Author:
Becky Alwood
CEO, MET Brands
OTR/L, CLT
Becky is the CEO of the MET brands. She served as the corresponding author of Inter-rater Reliability of Sustained Aberrant Movement Patterns as a Clinical Assessment of Muscular Fatigue (2016) published in The Open Orthopaedics Journal and she co-authored textbook Hand-Held Dynamometry: Guidelines for Daily Clinical Practice (2018). Becky has 15 years of experience as an occupational therapist including outpatient occupational therapy, hospital-based rehabilitation department management, and adjunct faculty at Andrews University. In 2011, Becky was chosen as one of the American Occupational Therapy Association Emerging Leaders in Middle Management and served as the Editor of the Administration and Management Special Interest Section of AOTA from 2013-2014. She is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire (2002) and the University of Indianapolis (2009).