As we all know, the Return-to-Play (RTP) is certainly one of the most important stages during a sports’ rehabilitation, but still the one with less guidelines or evidence to support the decision making.
Hamstring muscle injuries are the most frequent injury in football, thus, knowing how to deal with them during the RTP stage is of significant importance for medical departments that work with football players.
A wise RTP program with smart clinical criteria, progressions and targets to achieve might be a game-changer in what concerns hamstring injuries rehabilitations’ outcomes. In the recent years, the development and usage of GPS technology has been helping sports and medical professionals to understand the demands of football and individual players itself, being able to specifically build-up their fitness in the field until the previous level before injury. Nowadays with the GPS technology, field rehabilitations can be done faster and safer once we can now determine with high accuracy the internal and external loads applied to the injured player in rehabilitation, and be sure he is being able to cope with the demands for his position/game style/previous personal physical performance.
However, those technologies are still not available for the most of the medical departments because, although it can had a significant benefit for injury prevention and rehabilitation, those systems are still pricey, and so, not available for most professionals.
Considering this issue, and in track of what is our mission of spreading the knowledge in sports medicine and science through the greatest number of professionals and not only the elite, Football Medicine professionals decided to develop a content, considering our clinical experience and parallel research, on how to deal and progress in the RTP stage during a grade 2b hamstring rehabilitation without the need of using GPS monitoring, in which we unveil some hints for professionals that cannot afford those technologies to be closer to the session load targets that should be defined to insure a safe and fast progression during the RTP stage.
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