Warm-up program protects against girls' ACL injuries
April 29, 2006 | Nutrition and Fitness
Kids who play sports can injure themselves lots of ways. But girls are much more at risk for knee injuries, specifically torn ligaments. One Seattle high school team is taking a scientific approach to protecting its players.
Soccer doesn’t end in fall for the girls who play year-round in the elite Emerald City Football League.
But as more and more girls participate in higher levels of competition, the number of injuries has gone up.
One is particularly troubling. Research shows girls are up to eight times more likely than boys to sustain a tear of the anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL.
“It’s one of the primary stabilizers of the knee,” said Dr. Greg Schmale of Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington. “It prevents the leg bone from moving forward on the thigh bone.”
The 15-minute warm-up program can decrease ACL injuries by more than 80 percent.
Seventeen-year-old basketball player Alyce Pineda recalls the ACL tear she got during a game in 8th grade.
“The worst pain that I have ever felt in my entire life,” she said.
After surgery and months of physical rehabilitation she got back into sports. But this year she tore the ACL on her other knee.
Several factors could put girls at more risk. But Schmale says there’s one they can do something about.
“Looking at the relative strengths of the muscles in the front of the thigh, the quadriceps and the back of the thigh, the hamstrings, girls have a much higher mismatch between those muscles with much greater quadriceps than hamstring strength,” he said.
This soccer team uses a special 15 minute warm-up program designed by a team of doctors, physical therapists and athletic trainers. It’s specifically aimed at minimizing the risk of ACL tears.
Physical therapist Chuck Hanson learned of the exercise that was shown in an early study to decrease ACL injury by 88 percent in teams that tried it for a season.