Sixty million golfers around the world play golf. Golf injuries are most frequent in the spine, elbow, wrist, hand, and shoulder. Those injuries are often seen in golfers with more playing hours and suboptimal swing biomechanics, resulting in overuse injuries. Golfers who do not perform a warm-up or do not warm up appropriately are likelier to report an injury than those who do. There are several ways to warm up. It is unclear which warm-up is most useful for a golfer to perform. Moreover, there is currently no evidence for the effectiveness of a warm-up program for golf injury prevention.
Hence, Saskia Gladines stepped in and developed the Golf Related Injury Prevention Program (GRIPP) intervention using the Knowledge Transfer Scheme (KTS) developed out of our group. Now it is time to evaluate this new program’s effectiveness, and in this paper, we describe our protocol to do so.
AIM
This study will assess whether the GRIPP intervention effectively reduces the rates of golf-related injuries (GRI’s) in recreational golfers over 5 months. The hypothesis is that the GRIPP intervention will reduce GRI rates. The secondary outcome measures will be exposure to golf and compliance with the intervention program.
THE GRIPP PROGRAM
As said, the GRIPP program was developed using the KTS approach, which includes the end-user in the development process. The program consists of a set of warm-up exercises that prepare the body (muscles and joints) for golf and - hopefully - will reduce the risk of injury. The exercise and their instructions are presented in below. The golfer is instructed to perform all 6 selected exercises before playing golf.
METHODS AND DESIGN
The GRIPP study is a two-armed, randomized, controlled trial. Twenty-eight golf clubs with 11 golfers per club will be randomly allocated to the intervention or control group. The intervention group will perform the GRIPP intervention program, and the control group will perform their warm-up as usual.
The primary outcome is the overall prevalence (%) of golf injuries measured with the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center (OSTRC-H) questions on health problems every fortnight. The secondary outcome measures will be exposure to golf and compliance to the intervention program. DISCUSSION: In other sports, warm-up prevention programs effectively reduce the risk of injuries. There are no randomized trials on golf injury prevention. Therefore, an individual unsupervised golf athlete intervention program is conducted, which reflects the daily practice of predominantly unsupervised exposure of amateur golfers.