Effects of Plyometry for the Physiotherapeutic Treatment of Sports Knee Injuries

Abstract

Introduction: Knee injuries lead to decreased physical capacity of the athlete, committed to perform physiotherapeutic treatment with safe and innovative techniques, such as an exercise program with three different types of jumps in the last phase of recovery, performed in 8 sessions twice a week.

Objective: To determine the effects of a jumping program in the treatment of patients with knee sports injuries.

Material and methods: The type of research was quasi-experimental with a quantitative approach because a data analysis was performed before and after applying the Axon Jump 4.0 program to 20 participants; the study was previously endorsed by the ethics committee.  Inclusion criteria were taken into account such as patients with express willingness to be part of the study, with time availability, of legal age. And exclusion criteria such as patients with metabolic and degenerative osteoarticular diseases; post-surgical knee in acute stage, who do not have continuity in the research, with medical contraindication, who present other musculoskeletal injuries that are not object of the study.

The data were processed using the SPSS version 21.0 statistical program. Normality tests were performed, considering parametric tests when the value is greater than 0.05. To evaluate the effects of the intervention through plyometric exercises, a T student test for related samples was performed; through which the hypothesis was also tested at a significance level of 5%.

Results: showed that the Counter Movement Jump had a progression from 20.49±6.05 (before) to 22.47±7.2 (after), regarding the Squat Jump its values were similar with 23.48±7.1 (before) to 25.35±7.79 (after), finally in the drop jump values were observed between 21.8±8.5 (before) to 24.5±7.2 (after) being the highest increase. 

Conclusion: the increase in muscle elasticity, strength, and jumping level with the proposed program increased