Spinal Injury Profile Of Senior Handball Players: A Study Of Questioning

Abstract

In handball, specific physical demands differ and indifference to spinal demands can cause a serious hindrance in infinite value of sport life. The main aim of this paper is to make steps toward understanding and identify clear patterns of spinal injury profile from handball players according to their playing positions. With these challenge in mind, a new method using a structured and specific questionnaire has been applied to a number of 52 senior male handball players. The study reveals that the lumbar region accounts the most vulnerable to spinal injury with most of the cases with a chief complaint of low back pain than may oscillate over time, with asymptomatic periods between recurrences. For instance, the prevalence of lower back pain suffers variations with playing positions but we notice that the goalkeeper player is submitted to a higher risk of back pain and this requires a special attention to his special technical and tactical training program. This topic can be a particular good challenge for physiotherapist which should use their strong knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of spinal region, recognizing epidemiologic patterns and implemented a structured and specific injury prevention approach from an early age to optimize the injury prevention process or recurrence.