ACL Injury Prevention in Football - The Time is NOW
Posted on Sep 26, 2015 8:20am PDT
With the NFL season now well-underway, we've already seen numerous
non-contact knee injuries arise in players from numerous teams. The subject
of ACL injury prevention is one I am quite passionate about and have invested
thousands of hours of research and application in. Contrary to what many
people believe about knee injuries, they are often not a "fluke,"
but rather the result of improper or in many cases, non-existent prevention
training. I don't mean that statement as an indictment of NFL coaches
or athletic trainers, quite the contrary actually. It isn't that they
don't WANT to prevent these injuries, for most it's simply that
they don't even know they CAN be prevented in the first place.
My research into ACL injury prevention in athletes actually began more
than two decades ago with female youth soccer players and then with men's
soccer. Over the course of that time, some interesting consistencies began
to arise. The trouble seemed not to be coming from the mechanics of the
knee itself, but rather from weakness and lack of control in the hip.
Improper hip mechanics appeared to put the knee in a bad position, thus
overloading the ACL and causing it to eventually tear.
Armed with the unexpected knowledge our research provided all those years
ago and along with several esteemed colleagues, we worked to establish
a training program to help prevent ACL tears in young athletes. Called
the PEP program, and still in use today, this training protocol aims to
prevent ACL injury by addressing proper hip mechanics in athletes. And it works.
With years of research and training now under our belts, we can confidently
say that this program has been able to reduce ACL injury in up to 66%
of participants. Even better news? The program itself consists of training
exercises that require just 25 minutes per session, three times per week.
When it comes to extremely painful, medically expensive and potentially
career-ending ACL injuries, who doesn't have time for that?
While the research that my colleagues and I conducted didn't involve
NFL players, we truly believe that this program has application and value
across a broad spectrum of sports types, including football. With the
regular season just kicking off and not knowing just how many ACL injuries
will be sustained during it, I truly believe the time is now to begin
making these considerations. For the health of players and to demonstrate
to a watching young audience, this is an important conversation to have.
The great Benjamin Franklin said it best: "An ounce of prevention
truly is worth a pound of cure."