Shoulder pain in amateur fast bowlers: A case example illustrating opportunities to embed prevention in undergraduate physiotherapy education.
Muhammad A Dawood, Benita Olivier, Maria E Cochrane
Nine of 39 amateur fast bowlers (23%) developed shoulder pain during one season.
Scapular dyskinesia, reduced internal rotation, increased external rotation, and poor scapular muscle endurance and strength were the screening measures most associated with that pain.
Key findings
1Nine of the 39 amateur fast bowlers (23%) reported shoulder pain during the 2018–2019 season; three of those nine were time-loss injuries, and 96.7% of the reported injuries occurred during practice or match play.
2Scapula dyskinesia, decreased internal rotation range, increased external rotation (GIRD), and poor endurance and isometric strength of the deltoid, serratus anterior, and rotator cuff showed moderate-to-large effect sizes (0.3 or higher) in association with shoulder pain.
3Body weight and height showed no influence on the development of shoulder pain.
Still to come
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Only 39 players, all male, from a single league in one season; the pain group had nine people, so any comparison is very sensitive to one or two outliers. Observational design: the screening measures were associated with pain, not shown to cause it, and no intervention was tested. The paper states its purpose is to illustrate how these findings could inform undergraduate teaching, not to establish a clinical screening protocol or a causal risk-factor model. Single assessor performed all physical screening, so inter-rater reliability was not tested. Only non-contact shoulder pain was analysed; contact injuries and other body regions were excluded, which limits generalisability to all cricket-related shoulder problems.
Declared interests
Funded by the National Research Foundation Thutuka grant (PR_TTK191223497543). No industry sponsor, no author disclosures beyond that grant were stated.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat the effect sizes (some above 1.0) as a validated screening protocol for predicting shoulder pain. The pain group had only nine players, all male, in one league over one season. The paper states its purpose is to illustrate how these findings could inform undergraduate teaching, not to establish a clinical screening battery.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →