Caracterização do perfil de lesões do sistema músculo-esquelético em praticantes de futebol americano

Abstract

The American Football is a team sport and highly competitive, with vigorous physical contact that requires its athletes strength, speed and coordination, beyond the technical capabilities and game tactics. As with all high performance sport, the athletes of American Football are likely to be hurt by the very nature of this game type, where practitioners undergo vigorous physical contact during official matches and training. For this study a survey was conducted in the databases and Pubmed, Medline and Lilacs during the period of March to May 2011, without restriction as to the date of publication and papers in English and Portuguese. Altogether 13 studies were selected that described the characterization and injuries occurring in American Football. According to Shankar et al 2007, the position with highest susceptibility to be injured was running back, wich followed by lineback with 79% of them occurring in the lower limbs and 21% in upper limbs. The results of this study show the importance of training methods that respect the principles of sports training, including the principle of specificity, which in football is very important for a successful performance. Each athlete has their own intrinsic and extrinsic demands to the event of an injury, and extrinsic demands can sometimes be the same for more than an athlete, such as weather conditions and lawn.