Effectiveness of Injury Prevention Programs With Core Muscle Strengthening Exercises to Reduce the Incidence of Hamstring Injury Among Soccer Players: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Hamstring injuries are common in soccer, and researchers have long looked for ways to prevent them, often through structured injury prevention programs that include eccentric hamstring training. This systematic review and meta-analysis asked a narrower question: does adding core muscle strengthening exercises to these programs make a measurable difference in hamstring injury rates, compared with not including them. Pooling data from 5 randomized controlled trials covering nearly 4,730 players and well over 300,000 hours of playing exposure, the authors found a statistically significant reduction in hamstring injuries associated with programs that included core strengthening work, with injury rates roughly halved per 1000 hours of exposure. The finding is interesting because it points to core strength as a plausible piece of the prevention puzzle, but it rests on just five trials, and the confidence interval around the result stretches close to the no-effect line, meaning the true benefit could be considerably smaller than the headline number suggests.

If you play soccer or work with athletes who do, hamstring injuries are one of the most frustrating and common setbacks out there. Researchers wanted to know whether adding core strengthening exercises, like work for the abdominal and lower back muscles, to standard injury prevention routines might help reduce how often these injuries happen. Looking across five studies involving nearly 4,730 players, they found that players following programs with core strengthening exercises had fewer hamstring injuries compared with those who didn't, based on injury rates calculated over hundreds of thousands of hours of play.

The difference reached statistical significance, meaning it probably wasn't just due to chance, but the result is based on a fairly small number of studies, and the range of possible true effects includes some quite modest benefits. This doesn't tell us exactly which exercises worked best or how large an effect to expect for any individual athlete, just that, across these studies combined, the association was there.

This is a summary of research, not medical advice. Talk to your own healthcare provider about anything affecting your care.

This review addresses whether adding core muscle strengthening exercises to existing injury prevention programs sharpens their ability to reduce hamstring injury rates in soccer players, a question relevant to how practitioners structure prevention protocols. Pooling 5 randomized controlled trials (4728 players, 379,102 exposure hours), the authors report a risk ratio of 0.53 (95% CI 0.28-0.98, P = 0.04) for hamstring injuries per 1000 hours of exposure, favoring programs that included core strengthening. For practice, this informs the rationale for including core strengthening as one component within broader injury prevention programs, though the abstract does not isolate core exercises as a standalone intervention, so attributing the effect specifically to the core component rather than the multicomponent program as a whole is not established.

The main limitation is the small evidence base, only 5 trials, combined with a confidence interval approaching 1.0, which tempers how much weight any single estimate should carry when framing expectations with athletes or teams about prevention outcomes.