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Long static stretches before training briefly weaken strength and power, and stretching does not prevent soreness or reliably cut injury. Save static stretching for after, or for flexibility itself.
Percussive devices reliably loosen muscles and add short-term flexibility, but pooled trials show no clear gain for maximal-strength recovery or next-day soreness — and they can dent explosive output before training.
The stitch has a clinical name — exercise-related transient abdominal pain — and decades of study. It is probably not trapped wind or a cramping diaphragm, and a big meal beforehand makes it far more likely.
A jog and a few stretches has thin evidence for cutting injuries. Structured programmes that add strength and balance work — like the FIFA 11+ — cut football injuries by roughly a third in trials.
The old RICE drill was never built on strong trial evidence, and newer guidance drops the ice and anti-inflammatories. The durable parts are protection, gentle loading and time.
For acute ankle sprains, a review found only two poor trials and no clear benefit from ice. For sore muscles, cold-water immersion helps modestly. For low-back pain, a heat wrap has the best support.
A meta-analysis of 8,459 athletes found programmes with the exercise cut hamstring injuries by about half. In elite football, where the injury keeps rising, most squads leave it out.
Pooled trials show foam rolling briefly improves flexibility and eases muscle soreness, but its effects on strength, power and recovery are small to negligible — and the injury and 'fascia' claims are unsupported.
In 17,685 footballers, borderline ECG findings predicted almost no disease. Across 360 studies of female athletes, screening concentrated on mental health while menstrual and pelvic floor health went largely unasked.
Across 16,893 high school athletes screened over 15 years, 0.36% had T-wave inversions. Four were later found to have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a leading cause of sudden cardiac death in the young.
A Swedish study of 10,693 ACL reconstructions in registered football players found no link between graft type and revision surgery. Age and playing level mattered far more.
He said he thought he was done. What actually lets a 41-year-old compete at the NBA level isn't a secret supplement — it's sleep, hydrotherapy, and training loads built around recovery, not just output.
An umbrella review of 29 systematic reviews and 863 randomised trials found most treatments resting on critically low-quality evidence. Animal work suggests soreness can arise without muscle damage at all.
In a meta-analysis of 25 randomised trials and 26,610 participants, stretching produced no reduction in sports injuries. Strength training cut them to under a third — on a much smaller evidence base.
A review of 42 studies on South Africa's Comrades Marathon finds medical encounters at up to 20 per 1,000 starters — mostly dehydration and cramping, not the cardiac events that draw the most attention.
Ten years of national anti-doping reports show NSAID declarations flat at about 45%, a significant shift away from COX-2 selective drugs, and glucocorticoids making up around 13% of all prohibited-substance findings.
Three BJSM reviews underpinning the FAIR consensus pooled 1.5 million participants and 108 concussion studies. Women and girls were 2.4% of the lower-limb evidence base.