Research Injury prevention programs that include balance training exercises reduce ankle injury rates among soccer players: a systematic review

Question: What is the effect of injury prevention programs that include balance training exercises on the incidence of ankle injuries among soccer players? Design: Systematic review of randomised trials with meta -analysis. Participants: Soccer players of any age, sex or competition level. Interventions: The experimental intervention was an injury prevention program that included balance training exercises. The control inter-vention was the soccer team's usual warm-up program. Outcome measures: Exposure-based ankle injury rates. Results: Nine articles met the inclusion criteria. The pooled results of injury prevention programs that included balance training exercises among 4,959 soccer players showed a 36% reduction in ankle injury per 1,000 hours of exposure compared to the control group with an injury risk ratio (IRR) of 0.64 (95% CI 0.54 to 0.77). The pooled results of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) injury prevention programs caused a 37% reduction in ankle injury (IRR 0.63, 95% CI 0.48 to 0.84) and balance-training exercises alone cause a 42% reduction in ankle injury (IRR 0.58, 95% CI 0.41 to 0.84). Conclusions: This meta-analysis demonstrates that balance exercises alone or as part of an injury prevention program decrease the risk of ankle injuries. PROSPERO CRD42017054450. [Al Attar WSA, Khaledi EH, Bakhsh JM, Faude O, Ghulam H, Sanders RH (2022) Injury prevention programs that include balance training exercises reduce ankle injury rates among soccer players: a systematic review. Journal of Physiotherapy 68:165-173] (c) 2022 Australian Physiotherapy Association. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

This systematic review with meta-analysis demonstrates that injury prevention programs that include balance training exercises can reduce ankle injury rates among soccer players.