Background: The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) 11+ is an injury prevention program that decreases the incidence of lower extremity injuries. The purpose of the current study was to understand what specific exercises prevented injury from occurring. We thus developed and tested a form to identify these exercises. We hypothesize that trained examiners could accurately and reliably use this form to identify and record individual exercises performed during preparticipation warm-up.
Methods: A repeated-measures study design was used in this investigation. After observing five prepractice warm-up videos obtained from multiple high schools, 11 examiners observed and recorded performed exercises at two different times. The videos included four soccer teams and one American football team. Accuracy, interexaminer reliability, and intraexaminer reliability were assessed. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and percent agreement with a FIFA 11+ expert were measured for each exercise component.
Results: The intraclass correlation coefficients between examiners and individually ranged from 0.22 to 1.00 and 0.58 to 1.00, respectively. Reliability was lowest for exercises with similar movements. The percent agreement across all examiners for individual exercises ranged from 20% to 100%. Additionally, the percent agreement between each examiner and the “gold standard” examiner was high (range, 69.6% to 90.4%). For exercises with similar movements, accuracy and reliability were considerably improved (97%) when combined into one category.
Conclusion: We determined that trained examiners with different backgrounds and experience can make accurate and reliable observations of most exercises observed in warm-up programs. Using the proposed form, researchers can accurately record exercises and perform quality and fidelity assessments of warm-up exercise routines