"You run like a girl!" is an age-old taunt, but sports medicine experts have discovered that if female athletes are trained to run, jump and pivot like males, they can prevent serious knee injuries.
Advertisement
Female athletes are two to eight times more likely to tear their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), the major stabiliser of the knee.
However, a special training program could be just what the doctor ordered. By teaching women soccer players to keep their knees bent and play lower to the ground, the training resulted in 88 percent fewer ACL tears.
Drastic reduction in injuries Dr Letha Griffin of the Georgia State University in Atlanta and Dr Bert Mandelbaum of the Santa Monica Orthopaedic and Sports Research Foundation in California devised the programme.
They compared knee injuries among 1 041 female soccer players in the Coast Soccer League of Southern California who'd been given the injury prevention training. The researchers then compared those injuries to ones suffered by 1 902 players who didn't receive the training.
At the end of the 2000 season, the players who received the training had only two ACL tears, compared with 32 in the group that didn't receive training on moving more like boys.
Running style stiffer Griffin and Mandelbaum say that's because girls don't move with the kind of flexibility needed to relieve pressure on the knee.
"Girls run and pivot in a stiff-legged, upright posture," says Griffin, who is head physician for all sports teams at Georgia State University. "Boys, on the other hand, have knees bent and can play low to the ground."
"Boys can touch the ground from their running position. That's not true of girls," she adds.
Griffin says girls need to learn to keep their hips and knees bent, their body balanced over their legs and their posture straight.
Keeping weight lower to ground The training programme she and Mandelbaum devised for the California soccer league involved a special 20-minute warm-up that concentrated on running, jumping and pivoting with knees bent.
The women would perform normal soccer movements, but with a special emphasis on centring their weight lower to the ground.
The findings on their work were presented at a recent meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.
Different muscle strength Orthopaedic surgeons have offered several theories for why females are more likely to suffer ACL injuries, says Stephanie Vlach, manager of fitness education for the Life Fitness Academy. These include anatomical differences, variations in movement patterns and muscular imbalances.
"Women tend to have much stronger quads (the large muscle in the front of the leg) than they do hamstrings," Vlach says about recent muscle-related theories. "Men have much more equal strength between the two muscles."
Since none of these can be altered, researchers like Griffin and Mandelbaum have focused on teaching female athletes motor patterns that will prevent excessive stress on the ACL, Vlach says.
Train in front of a mirror Griffin says parents who want to prevent injuries to their daughters should encourage them to practice jumping and landing in a correct body posture, with their knees bent and their centre of gravity low to the ground.
The girls could hop in front of a mirror to watch whether they land in a proper flexed position, or parents could videotape their girls in action and then review how they are running, jumping and landing. That will let parents identify girls who are landing stiff-legged and need more training to keep themselves in a flexed position.
"The whole idea is to train on exercises that help develop neuromuscular control," Griffin says. "The proper position comes naturally to guys. It doesn't come so naturally to women." – (HealthScout News)
"You run like a girl!" is an age-old taunt, but sports medicine experts have discovered that if female athletes are trained to run, jump and pivot like males, they can prevent serious knee injuries.
Bookmark with:
What are social bookmarks?