Tuesday, September 2, 2008

What Female Basketball Players Kneed to Know

Basketball season starts in 6-8 weeks.
Just enough time for you to do something important.

In previous blogs, I've discussed various knee injuries, including the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) injury, a serious knee injury for which female athletes are 3 to 6 times more likely to suffer than their male counterparts.

Here's some more information from a recent article in The American Journal of Sports Medicine that examined knee injuries among boys and girls on High School teams in the United States.
  • Knee injuries were three times more likely to happen in a game than in a practice (not surprising, since practice is usually less intense and takes place in a more "controlled environment" than games).
  • The highest rates of knee injuries for girls in the study were seen in soccer and basketball.
  • Female high school basketball players were almost twice as likely to sustain a knee injury compared to the male players in the study.
  • Almost half of the knee injuries to girl basketball players caused them to lose more than 3 weeks of their season (or end their season or their career).
  • More than 1/3 of all knee injuries suffered by the female high school basketball players required surgical repair.

So what do female basketball players "kneed" to know?

Although not as combative a sport as football or wrestling, playing basketball puts the female athlete at a higher than normal risk for a knee injury that can end her playing career. While female players can't hope to avoid contact in what is becoming a high-contact sport, and they can't change the way they are built, they can significantly reduce their risk of suffering an ACL injury by spending the next 6-8 weeks working on an ACL injury reduction program.

For a list of some of the available programs, scroll down some and click on the PEP Program or the Girls Can Jump links in the Injury Prevention section found on the right hand side of this blog.

If you're a female basketball player, it's no longer an option. It's something you "kneed" to do.

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