Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury Prevention Exercises: Could a Neuromuscular Warm-Up Improve Muscle Pre-Activation before a Soccer Game? A Proof-of-Principle Study on Professional Football Players

Neuromuscular warm-up has been shown to decrease the risk of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury improving muscular firing patterns. All preventive training programs described in literature have a duration several weeks. To date, no studies explored immediate effect neuromuscular exercise on pre-activation time knee stabilizer muscles. Thus, this proof-of-principle study aimed at evaluating acute effects exercises electromyographic activation muscles’ pattern. We included 11 professional football players, mean aged 23.2 ± 4.5 years, from Southern Italy team. them underwent standard protocol first day evaluation. At 1 week, they structured protocol. assessed as outcome measure (ms) rectus femoris (RF), vastus medialis (VM), biceps (BF), and medial hamstrings (MH) upon landing. Outcomes were before after warm-up. Pre-activation RF, VM, BF MH significantly improved only (p < 0.05); moreover, there was significant 0.05) between-group difference all muscles compared with These findings suggested that physical consisting prevention might an muscles, thus potentially reducing ACL injury.