Research summary · Injury prevention
Injury-prevention exercises work best when athletes keep doing them
Researchers assessed whether completion of exercise-based injury-prevention sessions changes injury rates across sports.
- Publication year
- 2026
- First published online
- Publication type
- Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized and quasi-randomized trials
- Journal
- Injury Prevention
- Population / context
- Multiple sports
What the publication reports
Fifty-two studies entered the review and 35 the meta-analysis. Injury-rate ratios were 0.53 in the highest-adherence group, 0.50 in the middle group and 0.87 in the lowest group, whose confidence interval included no effect.
Limits and interpretation
Adherence bands were study-level tertiles rather than an individual threshold, and programmes and injury definitions differed. These ecological comparisons do not prove that a particular completion percentage is optimal.
Read the source
Consult the original record for the full author list, methods, references, funding and competing-interest disclosures.
Effect of adherence to exercise-based injury prevention programmes on the risk of sports injuries: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials
Original publication / indexed recordPMID: 40764021DOI: 10.1136/ip-2025-045632Full text at the sourceReader discussion
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