Sports injuries and proprioception: Current trends and new horizons

Abstract

Importance of proprioception has become increasingly clear in sports injuries, orthopedics, and rehabilitation. Researchers showed that proprioception is also important for other functions of the human body [15, 17]. However, current knowledge about proprioception seems to be inadequate to understand the physiology of the process and develop standard preventive and/or therapeutic strategies. New measurement methods of proprioception reflecting the instant of injury or symptoms might be investigated more in the future. The effect of proprioceptive rehabilitation techniques on the performance of an athlete in a specific sport is believed to be an attractive research area for scientists [7, 9, 18, 33]. Correlation between proprioception and other performance criteria such as muscle strength, balance, and laxity might be studied more in the coming years [23]. Thus, the importance of proprioception in disorders and problems of the body other than sports injuries may be an important research area. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.