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- Rehabilitation of long-standing groin pain in…
Rehabilitation of long-standing groin pain in athletes: a scoping review of exercise content and reporting
Key Points
- Most studies assessing exercise-based interventions for long-standing groin pain management were categorized to have low reporting quality on exercise parameters, particularly a lack of reported data on exercise intensity, adherence and progression criteria.
BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE
Pre-2010, literature on exercise-based rehabilitation for chronic athletic groin pain lacked transparency on the exercise parameters (1,2). The development of the Doha agreement in 2015 standardized classification of groin pain into four entities for the diagnosis of groin pain (3). Since 2016, an increased use of reporting checklists such as CERT and TiDieR has enabled structural transparency, however, these studies continued to show a lack of adequate reported data on the exercise protocol design, intensity, dosage, execution, starting decision rule and progression criteria (1-5).
A 2017 systematic review found that the reporting standards ranged from 0% to 63% which could be indicative of a lack of consensus among researchers on the documentation criteria for the specifics of these exercise interventions (6). This study had two aims, primarily, to assess the reporting quality of exercise-based interventions for long-standing athletic groin pain management and secondly, to identify and describe the exercise program characteristics.
The authors recommend prescription of one exercise for unsupervised sessions and multiple exercises addressing broader athlete-specific demands for supervised exercise sessions.
METHODS
- This review adhered to the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology, reported according to PRISMA-ScR guidelines and preregistered online. Databases such as Scopus, Cochrane library, PubMed, and Google Scholar were searched from database inception to March 2025 for English-language studies.