CRISP - Injury Prevention

The initial seasons of the Project focussed largely on determining the nature and frequency of injuries in the game. These initial findings have provided a great deal of information on the types of injuries that are sustained and the events during match play in which they occur. However further work is now being carried out to increase our understanding of other risk factors which in turn can can help to inform injury prevention strategies.

To understand more about which factors may be linked to the risk of injury, future work will aim to build on the work already started during 2012-2013 in terms of assessing functional movement control in community rugby union players. We will continue to investigate whether any particular lifestyle, training habit, functional movement ability or physical fitness component affects the risk of injury in the community rugby playing population. Such results may help to further inform injury prevention strategies which can ultimately be disseminated back into the community game.

Following initial findings, further pre-season testing sessions will be carried out at a sample of clubs within the 2013-2014 cohort. Sessions will include functional movement screening as carried out in 2012-2013 and in addition players will also be assessed for physical fitness using tests to determine levels of strength, power, speed, agility and endurance.