**Author details**

Meeuwisse (2010) added that most studies showed a high effect of an intervention until 88% reduction in injuries. Specifically, they showed that prevention strategies including hamstring eccentric exercise, neuromuscular training, warm up, balance board exercise, and core stability induced lower risks for acute injuries, lower extremity injuries, ankle sprain and knee sprains than no intervention strategy in youth soccer players (U13-U18). In this context, injury prevention strategies should be applied very early in youth soccer players' categories.

**Figure 6.** Ligament sprains and muscle strains incidence (per 1000 hours) during each training stage during two con‐

This particular book chapter has tried to provide an analysis of the main injury prevention strategies commonly used in soccer with the primary aim being to decrease the injury rates during both soccer training and matches. The combination of different prevention methods (functional strength, eccentric strength, isokinetic ratio, core stability, balance, proprioception, stretching, flexibility, stability, work on sand) have not been discussed due to the fact that each

However, the key point running throughout the chapter is the necessity to individualize prevention programs according to the athlete or players injury history, morphology, gender, age, testing data (e.g. medical and fitness tests) and their playing position. As suggested, preseason training allows a foundation to be provided through general and sport specific training (i.e. specific musculature, joints, tendons) whereas the competitive period needs individual preventive exercises (i.e. aimed at hamstring/quads). Moreover, the prevention exercises need

of them as a separate method has been reported to reduce the risk of injury.

**5. Conclusion**

secutive seasons (from Mallo and Dellal, 2012)

264 Muscle Injuries in Sport Medicine

Alexandre Dellal1,2,3, Karim Chamari4 and Adam Owen3,5

1 FIFA Medical Excellence Centre, Santy Orthopedicae Clinical, Sport Science and Research Department, Lyon, France

2 OGC Nice, Fitness Training Department, Nice, France

3 Centre de recherche et d'Innovation sur le Sport (CRIS), Université de Lyon 1, Lyon, France

4 Research and Education Centre, Aspetar, Qatar Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Hospi‐ tal, Doha, Qatar

5 Glasgow Rangers Sport Science Department (soccer), Glasgow, Scotland
