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Importance of Muscoskeletal Screening in Athletes

What is Musculoskeletal (MSK) Screening?

A musculoskeletal screening involves gathering information about an individual’s MSK condition and conducting a series of sport specific assessments to identify risk factors that could predispose an athlete to injury..

Why is it Important?

The primary benefit of a musculoskeletal screening is the prevention of injury.

  • Will identify individual athletes strength and weakness
  • Helps in planning accurate and specific rehabilitation and conditioning program
  • Reduces episodes of training sessions missed due to injury.

How do we screen?

In General:
-Observation of static posture

  • Non functional Assessment of joint movements
  • Muscle Strength and Flexibility
  • Normal gait pattern

Sports specific:
(Why Sports specific: Athletes rarely use single joint movements, instead body works as one unit)
-Dynamic Postural Assessment (Eg: Over head squats, Single leg squats, Push, Pull & Press Tests)

  • Stability Tests
  • Jump Tests
    NB: All tests based on the demand of sport, age, gender and individual

When to Screen?

  • To predict the injury risk factor at the earliest; Preseason MSK Screening plays a vital role
  • Follow up; twice in a season is most recommended

Limitations in Indian Scenario

  • Time consuming
  • Full fledged scientific team is required
  • Funding is limited in most of the clubs/academies
  • No standardized Indian protocol and datas are available to compare the results.
  • Still depending on foreign datas.
  • Lack of Systemic support
    Eg: Latest Technology, Softwares, Statisticians etc..

Future Scope

  • A standardized protocol need to be set by individual associations and should impose to perform on all registered academies or clubs under it
  • Data should be stored
  • After 5-10 years of follow up ; we can come up with a standardised normative data of Indian athletes

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