Monthly Archives: February 2009

“What’s interesting about that particular injury is that there isn’t another injury that seems to follow that gender trend. They seem to be more of a sport trend, like you see equal number of ankle sprains in men’s and women’s soccer, but if you look at the ACL specifically, whether it’s women’s soccer, women’s basketball, women’s volleyball, the rates are much higher then males in the same sport.”

“We had a 72 percent reduction in noncontact ACL injuries in our intervention group,” Silvers said, “and we had a 100 percent reduction of ACL injures, both contact and non-contact injuries, in the last six weeks of the season.”

PEP \”ACL INJURY\” REDUCTION PROGRAM

(CLICK LINK ABOVE)

Former Wizards goalie Tony Meola may have inadvertently helped reduce the number of ACL injuries that women suffer.

When Meola suffered a torn ACL in 1999, his sister-in-law decided to study more about the injury. Holly Silvers, who is with the American Physical Therapy Association, happens to be the sister of Colleen Meola, Tony’s wife.

“That got me very interested in noncontact mechanisms and why they happen,” Silvers said in a phone interview. “Here we are 10 years later.”

Now, Silvers has a workout regime, known as the PEP program, that she says has shown to reduce the number of ACL injuries in female soccer players.

Silvers, who specializes in sports orthopaedic rehabilitation methods in Santa Monica, Calif., helped develop the program, which was taken to 61 Division I women’s soccer teams for study in the fall of 2002.

Links to the specific aspects of the PEP program, along with video of athletes doing the program, can be found below.

“We took the warmup that they were doing previously and discarded it,” said Silvers, who is a member of the U.S. Soccer Federation men’s and women’s medical team. “We gave them a replacement one with strengthening exercises, plyometrics and agility drills that would focus on the major deficits that we saw in women who were incurring ACL injuries.”

The program takes 20 minutes to complete and teams did it two to three times a week. Silvers and eight others tracked injuries within the teams and a control group that utilized the warmup it had done in past. After the season, she compared injury rates for a study that appeared in the August issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine.

“We had a 72 percent reduction in noncontact ACL injuries in our intervention group,” Silvers said, “and we had a 100 percent reduction of ACL injures, both contact and non-contact injuries, in the last six weeks of the season.”

Yes — a 100 percent reduction. That means there were no ACL injuries in the last six weeks of the season.

Silvers’ program targets female athletes, she said, because the ACL injury rate for women is anywhere from two to 10 times higher than men depending on sport.

“It’s a significant difference,” Silvers said. “What’s interesting about that particular injury is that there isn’t another injury that seems to follow that gender trend. They seem to be more of a sport trend, like you see equal number of ankle sprains in men’s and women’s soccer, but if you look at the ACL specifically, whether it’s women’s soccer, women’s basketball, women’s volleyball, the rates are much higher then males in the same sport.”

Silvers, who is the director of rehabilitation for Major League Soccer’s Chivas USA, said her program can be tailored for any women’s sport where ACL injuries are an issue.

“The nice thing about it is you can be on the field with no additional equipment necessary,” Silvers said. “You only need cones and a ball, so it’s socially-economically responsible. You’re not inhibited by having to go to a facility or needing a lot of additional equipment.”

http://www.aclprevent.com/

http://www.kansascity.com/844/story/1048151.html