Relationships Between Strength, Sprinting and Muscle Architecture Capabilities in Sports Performance and Injury Prevention in Team Sports: Systematic Review

Strength training plays a central role in team sports by enhancing performance and reducing injury risk; however, congested competitive calendars limit the feasibility of isolated training blocks. Therefore, identifying strength-based interventions capable of simultaneously improving force production, muscle architecture, and sprint performance is of high practical relevance. This systematic review aimed to analyze the existing scientific evidence on strength training protocols that concurrently induce adaptations in these three domains in team-sport athletes. The review was conducted following PRISMA guidelines and registered in PROSPERO. A comprehensive search of Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, MEDLINE, and SportDiscus up to 2025 identified experimental studies examining the effects of strength-based interventions on strength, muscle architecture, and sprint performance in healthy team-sport athletes. Ten studies met the inclusion criteria. The findings indicate that not all strength training modalities lead to concurrent improvements across the three outcomes. Protocols incorporating high-intensity or eccentric strength stimuli, combined with sprint-specific or biomechanically related tasks, were more consistently associated with increases in maximal or eccentric strength, increased muscle fascicles, and improvements in sprint performance. In contrast, interventions focused primarily on hypertrophy or isolated strength gains often failed to translate into sprint enhancements. In conclusion, multicomponent training approaches that integrate high-intensity strength exercises with sprint-specific stimuli appear to be the most effective strategies for achieving concurrent neuromuscular, architectural, and performance adaptations in team-sport contexts.