CWSSL Facebook Page

1 day ago

A bit of reading but a fantastic article written by Chris O’Mahony who interviewed one of the top physios around about ACL injuries in the women's game and there is a lot of info in it but there are good ideas on reducing the likelihood of them happening too as opposed to dealing with them after they happened Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are a hot topic in women’s football right now. Irish duo Jess Ziu and Ellen Molloy, England’s Leah Williamson and Beth Mead, Dutch star Vivianne Miedema, France's Marie-Antoinette Katoto, Canada's Janine Beckie, and American duo Christen Press and Catarina Macario all missed this year’s World Cup due to the injury.Dr Dan Horan is former Head of Research in the FAI and spent 12 years working with Irish international football teams as a chartered physiotherapist and strength and conditioning coach. He is currently a lecturer in MTU Department of Sport, Leisure and Childhood Studies as well as owning a physiotherapy practice in FitnessWorx Gym on the Tramore Road. He undertook wide-ranging research alongside colleagues in University College Dublin and Linköping University in Sweden exploring injuries in women’s football over the past five years including a two-season injury surveillance study in the Women’s National League involving seven clubs in each of the two seasons. This open-access study has been published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports.“I was looking at the most common injuries that players suffered from, and the ones that kept players out of action for the longest,” Dan said. “The ACL is a ligament in the middle of the knee and it plays an important role in providing stability to the joint. If a player tears this ligament, she will require surgery to reconstruct it and the rehabilitation process is arduous. It’s important to say that, despite the increased attention ACL injuries are receiving in the media recently, they are not common injuries in comparison to many others. It is also not inevitable that girls and women playing football will incur an ACL tear. There were 8 ACL tears over the two seasons in our study. In comparison, players were five times more likely to have an ankle ligament injury, four times more likely to have a hamstring muscle injury, and twice as likely to have a quadricep muscle injury or a groin muscle injury. However, the difference between those injuries and the ACL tear is the length of time players are out of action. The average number of days players who incurred an ACL tear in our study were out of action for was 247 and that accounted for about 28% of the time lost due to all injuries over the two seasons. The added complication with these injuries is that we know that players have a substantially increased risk of suffering from a second ACL tear after their first one. Ireland international Rianna Jarrett is an example of this, having torn her ACL three times by the time she was 21 years of age. I looked after the rehabilitation of Rianna’s last ACL tear, and the recovery is an emotionally and physically challenging time for any player. There is also evidence that players who tear their ACLs typically experience arthritic changes in their knees earlier than people who haven't had an ACL tear, so the long-term consequences of this injury are problematic.”Dan, who played in the League of Ireland with UCD and Bray Wanderers, also played for Boston College on a scholarship in the USA 25 years ago and it is here that he became conscious of the higher rate of ACL tears in women than men. He explains that “we’ve been aware that there’s a 3 to 4 times higher rate of ACL injuries in women in comparison to men playing football for the past 30 years. The perception in the media is that there has been an increase in the incidence rate of ACL injuries in women’s football in recent years. It’s not possible to back this view up with statistical evidence at present because we don’t have long-term prospective studies on injuries in women’s football to refer to. As part of our research, we undertook a comprehensive analysis of every elite-level, amateur-level and international-level women’s football injury surveillance study that has been published in the past 40 years including studies in the top women’s leagues in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, and the United States. A limitation of all these studies at club level is that they were only conducted over one or two seasons. The international football studies were all published over 10 years ago so we don’t have comprehensive up-to-date research on injuries in women’s football that has been conducted on an ongoing basis over the past 20 years.” “In contrast to that, there's been a UEFA Elite Club Injury Study conducted over the past 20 years in men's professional football where the teams qualifying for the Champions League and Europa League have been sending their injury data to a research centre in Linköping University in Sweden on a monthly basis every season. This has allowed the research team to report on all the injuries that male professional players have been suffering from, so we can see the pattern of injuries over a 20-year period in the top-level of men's professional football. UEFA started an equivalent study among women’s Champions League clubs a couple of seasons ago, but the injury data has not been published yet. This means that we cannot compare and contrast injury data in top-level women’s football over a 20-year period the same way we can in the men's game at present.” “Comparisons with the rate of ACL tears in other sports are difficult to make due to a dearth of large-scale studies on injury incidence rates in women’s team-based sports. There are also differences in the physical demands of football in comparison to Gaelic football, camogie, hockey, and rugby so comparisons between sports are not straightforward.”“There has been some good research carried out in the United States looking at some of the risk factors for ACL tears in female athletes. Female players’ jumping and landing mechanics, particularly among adolescent girls, have been shown to be different to males. Specifically, some of the studies have shown that female athletes’ knees can buckle inward on landing, which is the typical mechanism of injury for an ACL. There is a lot of discussion at present about whether these jumping and landing differences are due to intrinsic biological differences between males and females or because women do not get access to the same amount of sporting activities growing up so they may not be developing athletically to the same extent” he said.“There has also been a systematic video analysis of about 35 ACL injuries in professional women's football which was published a couple of years ago examining how players’ bodies were positioned frame by frame in the lead up to the ACL injury. The majority of these injuries were non-contact and in many cases players suffered the ACL tear when they were decelerating quickly after sprinting out to defend against an opponent. We know that decelerating requires a lot of strength and power in the hip and leg muscles and the question is whether female players are physically conditioned enough to cope with the demands of decelerating when they're running at very high speeds. We also know that the physical demands at the top level of women’s football have increased hugely in the past 10 years. Data that was published after the 2019 Women's World Cup showed that the distances players covered in the highest speed zone increased by about 30% in comparison to the 2015 World Cup. We expect to see similar increases when we look at the data from the recent World Cup.”“The challenge in women’s football now is to ensure that players are fit enough to deal with these increased running demands. Players need to have access to qualified and experienced strength and conditioning coaches who understand how to prepare players for the rigours of match play. Our research in the Women’s National League and the analysis of 17 other injury surveillance studies worldwide showed that female players are about 7 times more likely to get injured in matches in comparison to training. There are many possible reasons for this but one of them may be that their training sessions don’t prepare them adequately for the intensity of matches. This may be due to a lack of access to strength and conditioning, sports science, nutrition, and medical support at many top-level women’s football clubs worldwide. FIFA’s women’s football benchmarking reports over the past 2 years have highlighted stark deficiencies in the support systems available to top-level female players with the absence of strength and conditioning coaches, medical staff, and sports science staff in the clubs participating in the leagues in many of the top 30 ranked countries in the world. Our research in the Irish Women's National League in 2020 showed that there were no paid strength and conditioning coaches or sports scientists in the league. It was also common for teams to train during the week without access to medical staff.”“What you have is almost a perfect storm for injury in female players at present when you consider the increasing physical demands of the game with higher sprinting speeds and sprint distances being covered in matches coinciding with inadequate access to strength and conditioning, sports science, nutrition, and medical expertise. We know clubs in our league have financial limitations but, unfortunately, unless more money is invested to provide players with adequate strength and conditioning facilities as well as access to experienced and well qualified strength and conditioning coaches, dieticians and medical personnel, our highest potential players may be exposed to increased risk of incurring catastrophic knee injuries. The good news is that we also know that well designed strength, power, and balance programmes can significantly reduce the risk of these injuries occurring so there is a lot that can be done to reduce the risk of ACL ... See MoreSee Less

Photo

View on Facebook

CWSSL Facebook Page

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Donate to our Fundraiser

CWSSL REGISTRATIONS

CWSSL MAIN SPONSOR

Food Sponsor Gaynor Squads

Media Sponsor

Quick Links

Recent Posts

Archive