Preventing catastrophic knee injuries in teenage girls!

This week our physio Naomi was asked to head along and chat to the girls and coaches at the Murwillumbah Vulcans AFL club about injury prevention.  In recent years there has been a massive increase in major knee injuries in teenage athletes, like ruptured anterior cruciate ligaments or major meniscus tears.  These injuries have typically occurred in older populations playing a higher level of the sport. Unfortunately now, this is occurring not just in elite sport but in recreational sport and in a much younger population of your suburban teenager playing Netball, Hockey, Soccer or AFL.

There is a lot of theories as to why this occurs.  The main theory is that teenage girls, in particular, can have poor hopping, landing, and cutting mechanics such as what is demonstrated in the picture attached.  This puts undue stress on the knee structures and can make it more prone to injury.  Luckily this can be screened for and fixed with the correct exercises and we offer pre-season and mid-season screening and prevention programs in our clinics.

There is also some great programs out there on injury prevention.  The major codes like the AFL with their “Footy First” program, Soccer with its FIFA 11+ program or Netball with its “Netball Australia knee program” are on the front foot to tackle injury prevention (pun intended).  These programs have some great injury prevention warm-ups that are aimed at training the correct landing, jumping and cutting alignment of the knee during these sports and if performed consistently can train the teenage athlete in the correct way to jump, land and change direction to stay injury-free.

If you’d like more info about our injury prevention program give us a call on 02 6672 8495.