The dance discipline ‘hip hop’ consists of many different styles. In relatively short choreography, dancers perform many jumps, pauses in non-natural body positions and rapid movements in great amplitudes with upper limbs. All that requires properly developed motor abilities. As in many other sports, injuries present an important health problem in hip hop dance.
Previous research show that the most common dance injuries are located in the knee, the ankle and the back, therefore the main goal of our investigation was to decrease the number of lower limb injuries among hip hop dancers. We designed a preventive structured training program which follows hip hop dancers’ demands and requirements and discovered its effect on injury occurrence and dancers’ motor abilities, morphological and physiological characteristics. We aimed to find out whether differences in motor abilities, morphological and physiological characteristics between injured and non-injured dancers exist.
In our randomised controlled trial, 161 hip hop dancers (18.71 ± 4.37 years of age) took part and were divided into experimental (n = 63) and control (n = 98) groups. Our collected data consisted of hip hop dancers’ demographic, morphological and physiological characteristics, motor abilities and prospectively reported injuries during the intervention (3 months) and after the 6-month follow-up. We compared the results between injured and non-injured dancers as well as between experimental and control groups.
Our main findings were: (1) decreased number of lower limb injuries in the experimental group and significantly increased number of lower injuries in the control group from the beginning to the end of our research, (2) dancers in the control group reported significantly more injuries than those in the experimental group after the intervention and after the 6-month follow-up, (3) the 12-week preventive training program decreased the number of injuries during the intervention, (4) the preventive training program significantly improved some parameters of motor abilities, (5) in hip hop dance, overuse injuries are most common, (6) the most frequently injured body part was the knee, followed by the back, ankle and shoulder, (7) non-injured dancers had significantly better results than injured in most of the tests of motor abilities.
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