A new study has found that young baseball players can benefit greatly from attending injury prevention programs before a season starts.
For this study, the researchers set out to examine the effectiveness of prevention programs for young pitchers in particular because their positions tend to have the highest rate of arm injuries. They recruited 143 pitchers with a median age of 15.7. The pitchers were divided into two groups; 88 received extra preseason training that was designed to help prevent injuries, and 76 completed the normal training program.
The prevention program included posterior shoulder flexibility training and a resistance and strengthening program that involved the use of free weights and elastic tubing. All of the sessions lasted about 15 minutes each and were supervised by an athletic trainer. Pitchers were required to do the session three times per week for eight weeks. The number of arm injuries was tracked over the course of the season.
The team used a digital inclinometer (DI) and standard muscle testing to measure the pitchers' arm strength and movement before and after the program. The researchers found that the prevention program helped the young players with their arm movement, which ended up lowering their risk of injuries.
"Pitchers participating in this targeted prevention program demonstrated reduced internal rotation (IR) and horizontal adduction (HA) deficits," corresponding author Charles A. Thigpen, from ATI Physical Therapy in Greenville, South Carolina, said in the news release. "Improvements in these performance areas are important, as similar deficits have been linked to arm injuries in previous research."
"The improvements in HA and IR deficits were associated with decreased injury risk over the course of the subsequent high school season," the authors wrote. "Thus, a targeted pre-season program appears to be effective in improving HA deficit and impacting injury risk."
Thigpen stressed the importance of incorporating these prevention programs throughout the nation.
"If we can encourage parents, coaches, and youth baseball organizations across the country to adopt similar programs, athletes may have a better chance for reducing time off the field because of injury, especially considering the increased effectiveness of the program in preventing subsequent arm injuries," he said.
The study's findings were presented at the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Specialty Day.
