November 11, 2011

Tom Bergeron
RivalsHigh Senior Editor

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Tom Bergeron is the Senior Editor for RivalsHigh.com. Send ideas, questions or comments to TBergero@Yahoo-Inc.com and follow on Twitter.

Teenage girls have a far greater propensity than boys to suffer serious knee and ankle injuries - it's a fact that has been known for decades.

This week, a study has shown there is a way to significantly reduce the chances of such injuries.

And it's easy to do.

Participating in a 15-20 minute dynamic warm-up before practice and games will decrease the risk of injury, according to a study released this month in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

A dynamic neuromuscular workout includes exercises such as jogging, sprinting, shuffling and jumping drills.

These drills raise the heart rate and blood flow while working on flexibility, agility and strength. But more importantly, they start to train the body how to do things properly.

Dr. Cynthia LaBella, the medical director for the Institute of Sports Medicine at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago who ran the study, said teaching female athletes how to do the warm-up properly is key.

"Repetitive training isn't helpful if you're doing it the wrong way," she said. "The key is to get coaches trained to give the proper feedback."

LaBella said girls develop a greater risk for ACL-type injuries at puberty.

"Boys get a boost of testosterone, which gives them a boost of muscle mass for their bigger body; girls don't get the testosterone - they just get the bigger body," she said.

At that point, it becomes vital to teach them the proper techniques.

Brian Robinson, the head athletic trainer at Glenbrook South High in Glenview, Ill., and the chair of the secondary school committee of the National Athletic Trainers Association, said he sees first-hand how a proper warm-up can help.

It's just a matter of doing it correctly.

"A lot of people confuse warming up with stretching," he said. "You need to warm-up to stretch, not stretch to warm-up."

Convincing coaches to do this, however, is not as it easy as it appears - especially for the winter sports season. With gym time often limited, coaches may not be eager to devote so much time to warming up.

Robinson said they should for a number of reasons.

"The proper warm-up will keep them from having these injuries, but it also will increase their agility and strength at the same time," he said. "There are other benefits other than just protecting their knees and ankles."

Robinson said it's never too early to start such a warm-up. In fact, he said, the sooner you do it, the easier it will be to follow through.

"If you can get this engrained at a young age, they are more likely to stick with it in junior high, high school, college and beyond," he said.

The study, the Effect of Neuromuscular Warm-up on Injuries in Female Soccer and Basketball Athletes in Urban Public High Schools, began in 2006 using 95 girls soccer and basketball coaches of varsity, junior varsity, sophomore and freshman teams in Chicago public high schools.

LaBella, who also serves as an associate professor of pediatrics at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said studies of this nature had been done previously with elite athletes. Her quest was to find out if such warm-ups can work at any level.

She was pleased to see they could.

"We had a girl in the study tell us that she never thought about landing; she said, 'I just come down,'" LaBella related. "Now she says, 'I understand the landing part is something I need to learn to do correctly.'"

If she masters it, her chances for injury will go down.