SPORT INJURY PREVENTION STRATEGIES             1500w

Groin pain occurs frequently in sporting activities such as running, kicking, soccer, rugby, and ice hockey which involve quick accelerations, decelerations and sudden rapid directional changes (Cowan et al., 2004 and Verrall et al., 2005). Hormon (2007) suggested that, groin pain may be caused by a sports hernia, osteitis pubis, nerve entrapment, adductor and Iliopsoas muscle strain or any combination of these entities. The most common location (>50%) of groin pain reported in athletes is the adductor muscle tendon region (Holmich. 2007). The assessment and treatment of groin pain in athletes is difficult as the anatomy of the groin region is complex and the ability to imagine the anatomy of the groin area is important for both physical examination and the differential diagnosis (Vincent and Victoria, 2001). Holmich (2007) reports that the cause of chronic groin pain left in debate and systematic clinical assessments using reliable examination methods were not carried out in studies and well-defined diagnostic entities are not reported.

Janda (1992), reports that in any sport the first part of injury management is injury prevention. Emery (2003) describes that, to develop and evaluate the sport injury prevention strategies, a good understanding of injury rates, the participant population at risk and the risk factors associated with injury for the population need to be first identified. In athletic population; groin strain injury incidence definition may be obtained by using a standardised exposure of actual player hours separated between training time and game time. The risk of injury is different for different sports (Junge et al, 2006). When taking the severity of the injury into account in a English Football Association team that the overall risk to professional athletes is profoundly high approximately 1000 times higher among professional football players than for high-risk industrial occupations (Drawer and Fuller2002). The high rate of injury incidence among different sports may have lead researchers to attempt to identify risk factors and preventive methods for different sport injuries.

Meeuwisse and Bahr (2009), defines risk factors are ‘the ones which causes the athletic injury or sufficient enough to cause injury”. The risk factors for groin injury in sport are considered as intrinsic risk factors like age, gender and physical fitness, level of play, anatomical alignment of structures, previous injury and body composition. The extrinsic risk factors such as protective equipment, sports equipment, environment factors like weather, surface of play, and human factors like opponent behavior, playing situation and also biomechanical description make the athlete susceptible to injury.