The Effect of Motor Imagery on Preventing Volleyball Players During Jumping and Landing

The nature of volleyball includes serving, blocking, and/or spiking, which require players to jump frequently. This high demand on the lower extremity causes high injury rates: approximately 58.7% of all injuries involve lower extremities, among which 51.8% are non-contact injuries . The knee accounts for 58% of lower extremity injuries -15.2% of which involve ACL- while 25.9% affect the ankle, including ligament injuries, sprains, and strains . These high injury rates cause players to lose game-time, 4.49 per 1000 hours for competition and 3.43 per 1000 hours for practice hours and cause their clubs to lose money .

Most studies in the literature focused on ACL injuries and they reported numerous risk factors, such as anatomic, hormonal, biomechanical, and unanticipated. Of these biomechanical risk factors, increased anterior tibial shear force, decreased knee flexion while landing, increased knee valgus, knee and hip internal rotation, and hip adduction were reported as the most important. These joint angle errors are reported to be the cause of 47.5% of the knee injuries in volleyball during jumping and falling . Also, altered kinetics in landing are suggested to potentially increase risk for ankle recurrent injury .

Recent studies have identified core and joint stabilization, stretching, strengthening, balance, mobilization, and flexibility exercises as a pivotal factor in preventing knee injuries in volleyball . In addition to these training programs, which help promote safer landing mechanics, training proper landing is also beneficial in injury prevention both for knee injuries and for ankle injuries.

Motor imagery (MI) is a contemporary method defined as a mental simulation of an action that is not actually performed . There are multiple brain areas, mostly motor areas, accepted to be involved in MI, but there is little evidence explaining the underlying mechanisms. Especially, the prefrontal cortex, involved in executive functions, is shown to be activated during MI tasks, but their interaction are not fully defined . MI has been described as a promising technique to facilitate the learning and improvement of motor skills in sports, education, and rehabilitation areas involving physical applications. Although the effectiveness of motor imagery in improving performance and learning new motor skills in sports is known, there is no research on its preventive role against injuries. The primary aim of this study was to investigate the effect of motor imagery on improving injury-causing factors related to jumps and falls in volleyball players. The secondary aim of this study was to investigate the effect of motor imagery on cortical functions.