Effectiveness of Warm-Up Intervention Programs to Prevent Sports Injuries among Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Sports participation by children and adolescents often results in injuries. Therefore, injury prevention warm-up programs are imperative for youth sports safety. The purpose of this paper was to assess the effectiveness of Warm-up Intervention Programs (WIP) on upper and lower limb sports injuries through a systematic review and meta-analysis. Searches for relevant studies were performed on PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, SPORTDiscus, and Cochrane databases. Studies selected met the following criteria: original data; analytic prospective design; investigated a WIP and included outcomes for injury sustained during sports participation. Two authors assessed the quality of evidence using Furlan’s criteria. Comprehensive Meta-Analysis 3.3 software was used to process and analyze the outcome indicators of the literature. Across fifteen studies, the pooled point estimated injury rate ratio (IRR) was 0.64 (95% CI = 0.54−0.75; 36% reduction) while accounting for hours of risk exposure. Publication bias assessment suggested a 6% reduction in the estimate (IRR = 0.70, 95% CI = 0.60−0.82), and the prediction interval intimated that any study estimate could still fall between 0.34 and 1.19. Subgroup analyses identified one significant moderator that existed in the subgroup of compliance (p < 0.01) and might be the source of heterogeneity. Compared with the control group, WIPs significantly reduced the injury rate ratio of upper and lower limb sports injuries in children and adolescents.