Inside the knee is a diagonal band of fibrous tissue, roughly the size
of pinky finger. When it snaps, the course of an NFL season changes.
On football injury reports, few words are as dreaded as “anterior
cruciate ligament.” ACL tears once ended careers. Even today, they
often signal lost seasons.
“It’s certainly a big cluster,” said Dr. Bert Mandelbaum,
a Santa Monica-based orthopedic surgeon and ACL injury prevention researcher
at the Kerlan-Jobe Institute. “There’s no question about it
being a big cluster when you have that many ACL injuries on any one professional
team. It’s alarming.”
An important caveat: Although Mandelbaum has worked closely with high-level
athletes, including the Galaxy and the U.S. Men’s National soccer
team, he has not directly examined any of the injured Chargers. Barring
closer analysis on his part, he could not say whether or not the Chargers’
rate of ACL tears indicated simple bad luck or an underlying systemic problem.
But Mandelbaum also has spent nearly two decades studying how to prevent
and reduce ACL injuries, a quest that began when he and other doctors
saw a spike in knee injuries among female teenage athletes in Southern
California. They realized that when the athletes were jumping, landing
or decelerating, deficiencies in their hip caused the upper legs to turn
in, excessive strain on the ACL.
In response, he developed the PEP program, which consists of warm-up and
strengthening exercises, plyometrics and stretches in order to promote
better posture and control.
This approach, Mandelbaum believes, could also benefit professional football
players. Over the past three seasons, he worked with team doctors, including
the 49ers’ Timothy McAdams and the Giants’ Scott Rodeo, to
examine film of ACL injuries. In doing so, they found 68 instances of
non-contact ACL injuries.
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