Good, concise article...body type, hormone levels, musculature, fascinating stuff no consolation to young Zelalem.
The women ACL thing is well known and is huge - like 7x the # for men. Esp in their late teens. Anyone around women's soccer know it because any decent team now does preventative workouts - proper bentleg landing etc.
In some ways you could argue that every player has their own baseline of quickness and explosiveness and any decrease hurts no matter what the reason. Age, injury or beer and potato chips which happened to Clint Mathis.
I always did. There is a lot of preventative strengthening and technique that has been shown to lessen the likelihood. (Soccer, Vball, gymnastics, running all big culprits.) But I have to say I was relieved when my second D took up swimming and water polo over soccer - until this year when she decided learning to do aerials at the gym was really fun and she might become a diver.... (esp since I blew my ACL in an unchallenged header 25 years ago...) I just yell "Bend your freaking knee when you land!!" throughout every practice (fun fact - ACL only engaged when knee is straight. If you land with knees bent/unlocked it's very difficult to pop your ACL)
He's right, women are more likely to tear their ACL's. It's structural, starting with their hips. That however doesn't matter much once you do tear your ACL. Zelalem now has a higher risk of repeat knee problems.
we can't hear those voices in your head. Of course all coaches of girls and women are very aware of this. So are female players. Why would you make a nasty comment like that?
It's all because of the freakishly large heads our species got. We must look like mutants to goats et al.
sorry this is OT but think of it as a PSA: if anyone still is not aware of the risk of and prevention of ACL injuries in athletes, esp. female, please look into it. http://contemporarypediatrics.moder...ntion-acl-injuries-adolescent-female-athletes
Arsenal's Gedion Zelalem, injured with US U20 World Cup team, to have knee surgery next week in Baltimore. Likely timetable 6-9 months #AFC— Steven Goff (@SoccerInsider) May 31, 2017
Feet and knees together, knees bent, toes pointed, eyes on the horizon!!! @Eighteen Alpha will know what I'm talking about!
The New York Times had a few articles on this problem in women's soccer and basketball, and the more detailed studies have all come down down to the same factors. There are compensation exercises that mitigate the risk, sometimes substantially, but they're a pain and they're boring. And, of course, you've got the simple problem that competitive players are, well, competitive which makes as well as requires them to be bloody-minded about playing through injuries and rushing back too soon after injury. A number of possible risk factors have been identified in women: wider hips; ligament laxity at certain stages of the menstrual cycle; the smaller size of the notch through which the ligament connects to the femur in the upper leg; a tendency to land straight-legged and knock-kneed; core instability; a greater imbalance than men in the comparative strength of the hamstring to the quadriceps, or thigh muscle. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/sports/ncaabasketball/27acl.html Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/magazine/11Girls-t.html
Yes, the coaches and players are, by now at any rate. The feminists, or perhaps that should be Feminists, are another story; they're so invested in their version of how the world (women very much included) ought to be that they can't/won't accept the limits the natural world on what women can do in jumping and cutting sports. It's not the only factor, and probably not even the biggest - the American youth system's excessive focus on athleticism at the expense of technique and soccer IQ and the bizarrely intense tournament system would be much bigger culprits IMO - but if you're not willing to acknowledge what causes a problem you're not going to prevent it from happening. Even when "workarounds" that can deal with much/most or sometimes even all of those limits are identified, they won't get to be used because to use or even tell people about them means that there was a problem in the first place. From the same New York Times articele: The bigger barrier, though, may be political. Advocates for women’s sports have had to keep a laser focus on one thing: making sure they have equal access to high-school and college sports. It’s hard to fight for equal rights while also broadcasting alarm about injuries that might suggest women are too delicate to play certain games or to play them at a high level of intensity. There are parallels in the workplace, where sex differences can easily be perceived as weakness. A woman must have maternity leave. She may ask for a quiet room to nurse her baby or pump breast milk and is the one more likely to press for on-site child care. In high-powered settings like law firms, she may be less likely, over time, to be willing to work 80 hours a week. She does not always conform to the model of the default employee: a man. Mary Jo Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, voices that sort of concern. “I’m not in any way suggesting that this topic should not be taken seriously,” she says. “We need to do everything we can do to prevent injuries. But when you look at the stories that get told, that those who cover women’s sports are interested in telling . . . it does seem that so little coverage focuses on women’s accomplishments, on their mental toughness and physical courage. There is a disproportionate emphasis on things that are problematic or that are presented as signs of women’s biological difference or inferiority.” Sandra Shultz, an A.C.L. researcher who teaches graduate courses in athletic training and sports medicine at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, said she was more willing to focus on sex difference. “It depends on what side of the fence you’re on,” she told me recently. “If your job is to encourage inclusion of more women in sport, maybe you are not going to accentuate the negative. You don’t want to paint women in a negative light and tell a girl that if you play sports, your knees, by the time you are 30 or 35, may be in bad shape. But intuitively, people know it. As a researcher and a clinician, I’m willing to talk about these things so we can do something about them.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/magazine/11Girls-t.html
All these considerations I know not from sports, but from anthropology. One of the big questions has been: "did women go out to hunt animals with the men or not?" So far the evidence is tenuous, and the way women run, land, throw, and turn suggests they may not have been part of the hunt. In anthro circles, this is particularly significant because there's the belief hunting, that is, competing with other animals, is how intelligence evolved --in particular spatial/distance analysis, the basis of mathematics. If women never hunted, that'd explain why, for all the efforts, their numbers remain low at the top of the STEM fields. On the other hand, it seems more and more likely that our cousins, the Neanderthals, had hunting females (at least from skeletal analysis). And since most of us have some Neanderthal DNA, that may compensate a bit. In fact, some posit their demise is in part due to their having hunting females: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/science/05nean.html On the other hand, STEM fields have a rather large share of male sexist types, so that could explain why so many bushy-tailed bright-eyed smart women give up on it and move on. Anyway, the topic is clearly outside what is considered polite supper conversation.
LOL. Just following on the topic. Someone seemed to doubt the basis for it when it's, in fact, well-known.
this is not the reality in modern women's soccer in Socal. My D's club coaches from about U13 on were extremely aware of the issue. (moreso than my nephew's hockey coach was about concussions, tbh, but that's a different convo.) In fact, for all but the top clubs, this is a bread and butter issue. In the US club soccer scene, losing a top player to an ACL tear means an entire age-group cycle without said player. While the Slammers or Tophat or FC STARS or Blues of the world can poach another girls from a lower team, most teams have to keep their stars healthy and happy to stay in the game. At the rec level it is a different situation. I had to push the AYSO folks to up their game on this front every year (they were much more worried about nearly non-existent concussions) But the upper level women's soccer, Vball and track are very aware in the US, fwiw.
It means watch your ass. The points of contact in a Parachute Landing Fall (PLF) are: 1. Balls of Feet, 2. Calf, 3. Thigh, 4. BUTTOCKS, 5. Push-up Muscle. I have often been accused of having my head up my fourth point of contact.