PREVALENCE OF HAMSTRING AND CALF TIGHTNESS IN COLLEGIATE ATHLETES
Description
Background: Muscle tightness is an inability of a muscle or muscle groups to move through a full range of motion for a specified body part. Amongst the lower limb muscle injury hamstring and calf muscle injuries are common in runners. Running-related sports demand excellent lower limb flexibility to avoid recurrent muscle injuries. Frequent muscle injuries in high-performance athletes are common due to hamstring and calf tightness and create significant player downtime due to their high mean time to return to sport and propensity to occur during crucial times of the competitive season. Objective: To find out the prevalence of hamstring and calf tightness in both males and females from dominant to non dominant side in collegiate athletes. Methodology and outcome measures: A cross-sectional study done in sports complex, Chandigarh University, Gharaun, Mohali in Collegiate Athletes from sports like soccer, baseball, cricket and sprinter to identify the hamstring and calf tightness. Active knee Extension test and Silfverskiold test was used for measuring hamstring and calf muscle tightness. 97.54% in right side and 95.65 on left side with mean 59.59 ± 5.448 and 63.30 ± 4.714. Prevalence of gastrocnemius tightness is 92.55% and 84.47% in right and left lower limb respectively. While the prevalence of soleus tightness was significantly low about 49.07% and 16.77% in right and left lower limb. Conclusion: Hamstring muscle and gastrocnemius tigthtness is common in sports which involve running while soleus tightness is less prevalent. Hamstring muscle tightness had significant relation with gender but no significant relation with dominant and non dominant side. Even there was no significant relation found in between the gender and dominant side with the prevalence of gastrocnemius and soleus tightness in the study. Keywords: Hamstring Tightness , Calf tightness, AKET, Silfverskiold Test.