Abstract
Handball is a popular sport and one of the most popular ball sports in Europe. It is a fast, cutting, dynamic, contact sport and it is also one of the team sports where players are mostly affected by injuries. It can be found in the top five sports in terms of number and gravity of injuries. During the last decades, the game of handball went through several changes (i.e., rules, court surface and size, and shoe design) which made it a much faster and dynamic sport. These changes, along with the rising popularity—resulting in increased number of players and games played annually—resulted in abundance of traumatic and overuse injuries. Handball requires higher and higher physiological and biomechanical skills. Epidemiological data on handball-specific injuries have been recorded either through retro- and prospective cohort studies or from registers from international tournaments or from registries of different national federations. Despite the great evolution of sports medicine in recent years, there is still lack of consensus among sports physicians regarding rehabilitation, exercise physiological screening programs, prevention, and return to play protocols. The purpose of this chapter is to assess the characteristics of the sport, the physiological and biomechanical demands, and prevention possibilities.
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Tállay, A., Laver, L., Fehske, K., Achenbach, L. (2022). Handball. In: Canata, G.L., Jones, H. (eds) Epidemiology of Injuries in Sports . Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64532-1_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64532-1_12
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