Balance training may prevent basketball injuries

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Balance training using a "wobble board" may help prevent knee and ankle injuries in high school basketball players, a new study suggests.

Balance exercises are commonly used in physical therapy for leg injuries, and there is growing interest in using them as part of athletic training, to prevent such injuries in the first place. But most research in this area has focused on professional athletes.

To see whether high school athletes might benefit from balance training, researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada followed 920 basketball players at 25 Calgary high schools. The schools were randomly assigned into two groups: one that stuck with standard warm-ups before practice and one that added balance exercises to the mix.

In the latter group, players received an extra 5 minutes of balance training before practice and were given wobble boards to use at home. Wobble boards are wooden disks that have a semi-circular base at the center; users stand on the board, performing various exercises while trying not to let the edges of the board touch the ground.

The point is to improve balance, strength and proprioception -- the ability to sense the position and movement of the various parts of the body.

Over the next year, there were 271 injuries among the study participants. However, the risk of suffering a sudden injury to the lower leg, such as a sprained ankle or torn knee cartilage, was 29-percent lower among players in the balance-training group.

Dr. Carolyn A. Emery and her colleagues report the findings in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine.

According to the researchers, relatively little is known about what works in reducing teen athletes' injury risk. The new findings suggest that balance training may help.

"These findings will be instrumental in developing and refining further prevention strategies in adolescent basketball and other adolescent sports," Emery and her colleagues write.

Future research, they note, should look at the effects of combining wobble-board training with other, similar forms of exercise.

SOURCE: Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, January 2007.