Sports Medicine and Fitness

After injury, most athletes immediately ask when they will be back competing. This is rarely straight forward and mired in difficulty. The key factor for treating clinicians is to facilitate a timely and safe return to sport. Unfortunately, reinjury in elite sports is still common with some figures hitting 30-35%. It is vital that performance multidiscipline teams establish working protocols with coaches and athletes to determine guides on facilitating a safe return to sport. This should involve relevant preinjury screening tools and objective markers post injury. Rehabilitation should be sport specific and follow a progressive steady overload principle. The rehabilitation timelines should be based on injury healing and load progression and not determined by forthcoming matches or competitions. The path of rehabilitation should be also be guided on the pre and post injury screening/ clinical tools. Research evidence to support return to sport decisions in clinical practice is scarce. Future work should focus on a standardized approach to defining, measuring and reporting return to sport outcomes, and identifying valuable prognostic factors for returning to sport.