Introduction: Groin injuries are one of the most common injuries in sports. They represent from 8 % to 18 % of all injuries in male football (soccer). Most of groin injuries are adductor muscles injuries, probably because of great eccentric forces that these muscles endure during quick and powerful movements. The most important groin injury risk factors are reduced adductor muscles strength, previous groin injury, higher level of play and lower levels of sport-specific training. A deficit of eccentric adductor muscles strength was observed in players with groin pain, which indicates the potential efficiency of exercise programs, which would focus to improve the strength of these muscles. Purpose: The objective was to determine the efficacy of specific exercise programs in preventing groin injuries in football players. Methods: English literature published between 2001 and 2021 was searched for in PubMed and PEDro databases. Only randomized controlled trials about exercise prevention programs, in which the subjects were footballers and injuries were reported, were included. The literature was analyzed based upon characteristics of subjects, properties of studies, outcome measures and efficacy of exercise programs. Results: Due to limited available literature and to ensure relative comparability, only six studies were included in the analysis. One of the exercise programs included Copenhagen adduction exercise, two included a specific set of six exercises and the other three used a variant of the FIFA 11+ program. The program was implemented one to four times a week for a whole season. The main outcome measure was the number of groin injuries. Only the Copenhagen adduction exercise produced statistically significant results, lowering the groin injury incidence by 41 %. The rest of the studies did not produce statistically significant results or they did not calculate the statistics for the groin injuries. Compliance with the program was low in most of the studies, ranging from 32.7 % to 83.0 %. Discussion and conclusion: Based on the current literature we cannot conclude about the efficacy of the exercise programs in preventing groin injuries, because only the Copenhagen adduction exercise was proved to be effective. The other studies had more limitations, which prevent us from drawing conclusions. One of the main reasons for the indefinite results is surely the low compliance with the programs, which is reported in most of the studies. Despite everything, the results from most of the studies do show a positive potential, that doing this exercise programs regularly can lower the groin injury incidence, though further research in which the drawbacks of these current studies will be eliminated, is required in order to acquire tangible results.
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