Low adoption in women’s professional football: teams that used the Nordic Hamstring Exercise in the team training had fewer match hamstring injuries

OBJECTIVES: The primary objective was to study the reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation and maintenance of the Nordic Hamstring Exercise (NHE) programme in women’s elite teams in Europe in the 2020–21 season. The secondary objective was to compare hamstring injury rates between teams that used the NHE programme regularly in team training and teams that did not. METHODS: Eleven teams participating in the Women’s Elite Club Injury Study during the 2020–21 season provided data about injury rates and the implementation of the NHE programme. RESULTS: One team (9%) used the full original NHE programme, and four teams used the programme in the team training during parts of the season (team training group, n=5). Five teams did not use the NHE, or used it only sporadically for individual players, and one team used NHE only for players with a previous or current hamstring injury (no team training group, n=6). The team training group had a lower incidence of hamstring injuries during match-play (1.4 vs 4.0, p=0.028) than the non-team training group while no difference between groups was shown for the hamstring injury incidence in training (0.6 vs 0.7, p=0.502). CONCLUSION: A low adoption of the NHE programme was reported during the 2020–21 season. However, teams that used NHE for the whole team or most players had a lower hamstring injury incidence at match-play than teams that did not use the NHE or used it for individual players only.