Preventing injuries among recreational adult volleyball players

Both acute and overuse injuries are common among recreational volleyball players, especially finger/wrist, shoulder, knee and ankle injuries. Consequently, an intervention (‘VolleyVeilig’) was developed in order to prevent or reduce the occurrence of finger/wrist, shoulder, knee and ankle injuries among recreational volleyball players. This article describes the design of a study evaluating the effectiveness of the developed intervention on the one-season occurrence of finger/wrist, shoulder, knee and ankle injuries among recreational adult volleyball players.

A randomized prospective controlled trial with a follow-up period of one volleyball season is conducted. Participants are healthy recreational adult volleyball players (18 years of age or older) practicing volleyball (training and/or match) at least twice a week. The intervention (‘VolleyVeilig’) consists of a warm-up program based on more than 50 distinct exercises (with different variations and levels). The intervention programme was compared to volleyball as usual. Outcome measures are incidence of acute injury (expressed as number of injuries per 1000 hours of play) and prevalence of overuse injuries (expressed as percentage).

The objective of the study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed intervention (‘VolleyVeilig’) on the one-season occurrence of finger/wrist, shoulder, knee and ankle injuries among recreational adult volleyball players. Analogously to previous studies about the effect of preventive interventions in volleyball and in other sports, the hypothesis of this study is that the developed intervention would lead to a 40% reduction of the number of musculoskeletal injuries over the one-season follow-up in the intervention group by comparison to the control group.

Exposure, injuries and compliance are reported every two weeks with an online form.

Intervention ‘VolleyVeilig’ vs. Volleyball as usual