Fewer sports injuries with digital information

Many promising athletes have had their careers ruined by injuries. One thing that almost all athletic events have in common is high loads for a short period of time, such as jumping, throwing and running. This leads to overuse injuries such as groin pain and sore shoulders, but also to sudden injuries such as ankle sprains and hamstring tears.

Jenny Jacobsson is a physiotherapist and visiting researcher at the Athletics Research Center of Linköping University. She has worked for many years as a medical coordinator for the Swedish national athletics team and has seen the impact of injuries on athletes.

“Before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, we saw a lot of injuries in our national team and tried to find out why. At the time, no research had been done into the incidence of injuries in track and field athletes. But we wanted to know what was happening among our elite. athletes aged 16 and over, including adult elite athletes,” says Jenny Jacobsson.

The research into injuries in Swedish athletics showed that one of the main causes of injuries was previous injuries. This means that the earlier an athlete is injured in their career, the more likely they are to be injured later and more often. But the causes of injuries in youth sports are a complex issue, involving everything from training amount and load to equipment and even sleep.

Together with her colleagues at the Athletics Research Center, Jenny Jacobsson has developed a digital health platform with information for parents and youth coaches about adolescent growth and how it is influenced by training, with a focus on track and field athletes aged 12-15.

To investigate whether this type of platform can prevent injuries, the researchers conducted a study in which 21 athletics clubs with athletes aged 12 to 15 were randomized into two groups: an intervention group and a control group. During the preseason, the parents and coaches of the intervention group were given access to the digital information platform for four months, which was not accessible to outsiders at the time (but is now accessible to everyone). They were also regularly encouraged to log in and explore its content.

The researchers noted that the clubs that accessed the information showed significantly lower injury incidence and took twice as long for the first injury to occur. Moreover, the effect was greater at large clubs. The results, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, could point the way to more injury-free athletics.

“We have not investigated the mechanism that leads to change, but we see that digital information works when it comes to injury prevention. If coaches and parents learn to recognize the problems, it is possible to reduce the training burden in time. Medically speaking, we do know.” what happens in growing bodies, but spreading the information to those who could benefit from it has been a challenge. This platform can bridge that gap,” says Jenny Jacobsson.

The research was funded by the Swedish Research Council for Sports Sciences (Centrum för idrottsforskning).