World Cup women: free to play with fury
Once women can leave it all on the field, they are free to display their full arsenal. Just like men.
Who is watching the children?
When Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva took the ice for her free skate were you holding your breath? rooting for her? booing her? Did you look away or leave the venue, as it’s reported the USA skating team did? Or did you stand agape like I did, watching a 15 year old child who bore […]
The simple solution to defeating acl injuries: teach healthy movement to our U-8s and U-10s!
To beat ACL injuries which are devastating our athletes in their teens and twenties, we have to train them to move healthier when they’re 8-14! Here’s how you can put that in place.
How to make your dynamic warm-up into an ACL injury prevention warm-up
Dynamic warm-ups are the norm for teams getting ready to play, but they’re not enough to address the high risk for ACL injuries that exists for female high school athletes today. To do that, we need to include ACL injury prevention exercises. There is strong evidence that well-structured ACL injury prevention warm- ups work. They […]
Prevention Programs Reduce ACL Injuries by > 50%
Neuromuscular injury prevention training programs have been shown to reduce non-contact and indirect-contact ACL injuries by more than 50%. This percentage jumps to as high as 88% for comprehensive programs designed for the highest risk populations — young female athletes who participate in jumping and cutting sports. Recent meta-analyses of various injury prevention programs identified […]
Play to Win: Our World Cup Champions Showed us How
Wow, what a run the US Women’s Soccer Team made to their 4th World Cup Championship! They were exciting, inspiring, motivating, and … provoking. Before the blazing images lose their luster, I want to remember what their efforts have sparked in this old soul, slightly past her soccer prime. No, I can’t hope to imitate […]
The Secret to Beating ACL Injury
ACL injuries should be on the decline since we know that ACL injury prevention programs like the FIFA 11+ significantly reduce the risk of this injury. But instead, they’re on the rise — especially among high school athletes and particularly among high school female athletes in running, jumping and cutting sports like soccer, basketball, field […]
16 Action Items for Healthy Sport, Fitness and Life
The world’s leaders in exercise science and sports medicine met in Minneapolis at the 65th annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine. The result: BIG news and reliable, evidence-based recommendations for physical activity, health and the reduction of injury. Here are my top 16 headlines with news you can use. Knee Injury Prevention ACL injury […]
The Most Powerful Advice I Ever Received: “Just because it failed doesn’t mean you’re a failure”
Just because it failed, doesn’t mean you’re a failure. I heard this for the first time when I was in my early 20’s. Having completed an arduous laboratory experiment which required many repetitions over weeks of work, I could draw a conclusion about my hypothesis: it was wrong. Trial after trial proved my result: negative. […]
Add Injury Prevention to Your Dynamic Warm-Up in 2 Minutes
Are you doing all you can to protect your players from tearing their ACLs? Instituting a regular dynamic warm-up is an important first step toward keeping our athletes healthy. In my last post, The Dynamic Warm up, Why Do it?, we looked at the three primary reasons players need to warm up. If you don’t have a fixed warm-up, […]