It still frustrates me at how many knee and ankle injuries I see on a weekly basis. There is so much research being done on knee injuries, Anterior Cruciate Ligament injuries probably more than any other knee injury due to the timeframes away from activity and the cost of each injury. Surgery for an ACL injury, if you do not have private health insurance and you want to pay for the surgery and hospitalisation upfront would be at least $10,000 when you considered medical, surgical and hospital costs. This probably does not pay for any time off work, or rehabilitation required.
So, this article is starting a conversation on the things that in my experience from the reading I have done, and the work I have done with people for a long time in prevention of knee injuries.
What can I do to help prevent knee injuries?
Get better Glutes –
The Gluteals, or Buttock muscles provide absolutely an essential “pathway” to power for anyone, whether an athlete or any regular man or woman who want to run in any way.
So, there are three exercises that we recommend for increasing Glutes:
A. Romanian Deadlifts
B. Squat variations
C. Deadlift Variations
Why? Well… because when we sit for too long, it is really common for people to increase the amount of lordosis, or lumbar spine curvature that exists in the body. When this happens, the pelvis usually anterior rotates, to help “sit up straight.” When we sit like this, it effectively stops the Glutes from working, and over-lengthens the hamstrings, and the hip flexors become tighter. So, when a lot of people go to squat and deadlift, it means that they “arch” their back, which is really caused by the pelvis tending to anteriorly rotate, therefore increasing the pressure on the lumbar spine discs in hyperextension.
The reason that we want to strengthen the GLutes, is to activate Glutes, we need a stable trunk, meaning a stable or neutral pelvis angle and therefore we can expect in that anatomical position for the Glutes, Hamstrings, and stabilisers of the trunk to work appropriately.
This is a brief explanation of this, however we are planning to post up some more extensive video content with some more detailed explanation over the next few weeks.
Warm up properly!
The goal of warming up for sport or exercise is to achieve a few key objectives:
a. To increase blood flow and heart rate and to attempt to avoid any risk of an acute cardiac event.
b. To decrease the risk of musculoskeletal injury taking place.
c. To provide appropriate physical and mental preparation for the exercise or sport to be undertaken.
So, what is an example of a good warm up to decrease knee injuries? As part of this article, we are offering access to a free program for coaches, athletes and parents valued at $44.95. This program is a basic warm up to help in knee injury prevention.
Practice landing in multi-directions
It is critical that athletes are taught how to land effectively. Most ACL and ankle injuries happen during landing, or deceleration. So, learning how to land and decelerate your body is so important to help prevent more injuries.
It is important to note that learning how to land, and then training landing skills cannot be learned, then left! You HAVE to keep working on it, practicing and improving, increasing your capacity over time, especially as you grown in physical stature, size, strength and power. You have to be able to match what power your produce by how you REDUCE this power on landing, or deceleration!
The main issue with landing incorrectly is the amount of valgus that takes place on landing. Valgus is really well explained on this You Tube video about ACL injuries.
What does a Strength and Conditioning Coach or Exercise Physiologist do to help me?
What we do more than anything is guidance on HOW to do the exercises to prevent your knee, and to analyse your movement competency and to work on fixing flaws in movement. Flaws can include valgus tendencies in landing, poor hip hinge (so using your lumbar spine to hinge instead of your hips), pick up issues with your foot contact and to work on improving this to improve your foot stability, and therefore your ankle and knee stability in landing.
It does not matter on what you do. It definitely matters on how you do it. Simple things done at a high level, which is our job. To implement with you simple things done at a high level.
If you would like more information about how we can help you, please contact us on 4927 8190 or email reception@vectorhealth.stagingarea.net
We coach face to face and virtually so happy to help you, no matter your location.