Introduction
DOMS, muscle injuries, traumatic injuries, fatigue, Muscle injuries, EIMD, muscle damage, muscular fatigue, delayed-onset muscle soreness, muscle fatigue
Muscle injuries are the most frequent injury type in soccer, eliciting enormous periods of downtime for players as well as financial costs for clubs (Ekstrand et al. Exercise-induced muscle damage (EIMD) and its associated symptoms of delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) have been assumed to represent a precursor of structural muscle injuries by the experts of the Munich consensus statement (Mueller-Wohlfahrt et al. Despite these findings and their potential implications for injury prevention in elite sports, only a handful of studies with the aim to address the influence of muscular fatigue on exercise-induced hamstring muscle damage have been conducted in an experimental research setting. In addition, these studies have yielded controversial results, creating ambiguity on the extent to which muscular fatigue influences EIMD and the risk of further structural damage. Nosaka and Clarkson (Overall, the available research regarding the exact effects of muscle fatigue on EIMD is unclear. Further, it is currently difficult to draw conclusions on the extent of which acute and residual fatigue influence muscle damage in recreational or professional athletes, especially in the hamstring muscles. Given that in contact sports traumatic injuries are usually insurmountable to prevent, prevention programs and close athlete monitoring might offer options to counteract overuse hamstring injuries (Chebbi et al. As the number of hamstring injuries rises towards the end of the matches’ halves, and with increased match frequency, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of acute (AF) and residual (RF) muscular fatigue on EIMD of the hamstring muscles. Based on the observations by Ekstrand et al. (