YOU 'KNEED' TO KNOW

Basketball games start in 6-8 weeks.

Just enough time for you to do something important.

In previous entries, we’ve discussed Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) knee injuries, a serious knee injury for which female athletes are 3 to 6 times more likely to suffer than their male counterparts. Covenant has had three (3) ACL injuries in the past four years.

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 US.

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 workouts (plyos).

(thanks Nfinity)