The Easy Way Girls Can Prevent Injuries

Teen girls have a far greater likelihood than boys to suffer serious knee and ankle injuries – it’s a fact that has been known for decades . This week, a study has shown there is a way to significantly reduce the chances of such injuries. And it’s easy to do.

Participating in a 15-20 minute dynamic warm-up before practice and games will significantly decrease the risk of injury , according to a study released this month in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. A dynamic neuromuscular workout includes exercises such as sprinting, jogging , shuffling and jumping drills, combined with simple stretching exercises. These drills raise the heart rate and blood flow of the individual while working on flexibility through stretching, agility and strength. But more importantly, they begin to train the body how to do things effectively.

Dr. Cynthia LaBella, the medical director for the Institute of Sports Medicine at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago who oversaw the study, said teaching female athletes how to warm up properly is critical. “Repetitive training isn’t valuable if you’re doing it the wrong way,” she said. “The key is to get coaches trained to give the proper feedback.” LaBella said young women develop a greater risk for ACL-type injuries during puberty. “Boys get a boost of testosterone, which gives them a boost of muscle mass ; girls don’t get the boost of testosterone that boys do – but their bodies are still growing ,” she said. At that point, it becomes important to teach them the proper techniques .

Brian Robinson, the head athletic trainer at Glenbrook South High in Glenview, Ill., and the chair of the secondary school committee of the National Athletic Trainers Association, said he sees first-hand how a proper warm-up can be beneficial . It’s just a matter of doing it accurately. “A lot of people confuse warming up with stretching on its own,” he said. “You need to warm-up and stretch, not stretch to warm-up.”

Convincing coaches to do this, however, is not as easy as it looks – especially for the winter sports season. With gym time usually limited, coaches may not be eager to devote so much time to warming up . Robinson said they must for a number of reasons. “The proper warm-up will keep them from having these injuries, but it also will increase their strength and agility at the same time,” he said. “There are other benefits other than just protecting their knees and ankles .”

Robinson said it’s never too early to begin such a warm-up. In fact, he said, the sooner you do it, the less difficult it will be to continue it . “If you can get this ingrained at a young age, they are more likely to stick with it throughout their school years and throughout their lifetime ,” he said. The study, the Effect of Neuromuscular Warm-up on Injuries in Female Soccer and Basketball Athletes in Urban Public High Schools, began in 2006 using 95 womens’ basketball and soccer coaches of varsity, junior varsity, sophomore and freshman teams in Chicago area public high schools.

LaBella, who also works as an associate professor of pediatrics at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said research of this nature had been done previously with elite athletes. Her mission was to find out if such warm-ups can work at any level . She was pleased to see they could. “We had a girl in the study tell us that she never thought about landing; she said, ‘I just come down,’” LaBella related. “Now she says, ‘I understand the landing element is something I need to learn to do accurately.’” If she masters it, her probabilities for injury will decrease .

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