Girls More Prone for Sports Injuries

Posted on July 9, 2008
Filed Under Science |

Interesting NYT article about how girls are more prone for sports injuries. The figures for some injuries and sports are pretty dramatic. Girls High School basketball players get concussions at three times the rate for boys. The concussion rate in soccer for girls is 1.5 times that of boys. ACL injuies are supposed to be massively larger for women. Women playing soccer, basketball or gymnastic all tear ACLs more than male college football players. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it. Women basketball players tear their ACL 3 times as often as men. Women soccer players tear their ACLs 2.5 times as much as men.

The general reason given is muscle strength. While I suspect doing more strength training for women would help genetics only gets you so far unless you ‘roid up. (And only an idiot would do that)

I found one interesting study that found length of time playing appeared to have no effect on injuries. That suggests it wasn’t about being out of shape or “untrained.” It did suggest that women might do better having less contact in the sports. That is have the sports be a little less violent.

While I wasn’t a jock when I was young, it does seem pretty clear that we men tend to have an element of violence in many of our sports. Even the sport I was addicted to when younger - climbing - had a pretty strong element of violence. Although it was a battle of nature against man. (We used to joke that if you didn’t come home with some blood you probably weren’t trying hard enough - although that was usually just skinned knees and knuckles)

Getting back to women’s sports it makes me wonder what I’ll do when my daughter is older. She’s already a bit of a daredevil and very physical. While I have a feeling she’s a natural climber the issue of injuries makes me wonder what I’d do once the sporting decisions start. Of course that’s true of my son as well. I’m pretty sure I don’t want him to go into football- although that’s as much about side issues.

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12 Responses to “Girls More Prone for Sports Injuries”

Interesting study. One would expect that over time, not only would individual athletes become stronger and less injury-prone, but also that weaker athletes would drop out of competitive sport. Perhaps the fact that the competition gets tougher over time neutralizes the effect of better conditioning. I’m also curious about the use of ACL as a measure: sometimes it seems as though upon signing up for soccer one also enrolls in the tear-my-acl program. (There’s also the fact that many ACL strains/tears go undiagnosed for years….)

I think what’s interesting isn’t just the injuries they primarily focused in on (concussions and ACL tears) but the vast difference between men and women. I’d known this was true of gymnastics. Although of course men get seriously injured too. (My brother ripped his leg in half doing giants and was in a cast for about four months) But women just appear to get more seriously injured. It’s not that women are muscular. If you’ve been around female gymnasts you know they are very muscular. But the men are just significantly more muscular.

Actually it was a diamadoff on the high bar (pinged at the bottom). Gymnastics is actually a pretty good basic skill builder Clark. Just cut it off before things get too serious - for girls around 9 or 10.

I wonder how much center of gravity has to do with the accident rates? Probably not as much as basic muscle mass.

We were talking about this before bed and Nicole raised a good question. She wondered if anyone had studied the injury rate when women were on their period vs. off. She thought there might be weakness in the bones and possibly joints when you were having a period. In difficult sports I suspect a difference in concentration would make a difference as well. I have no clue what the answer is but I would be curious to know.

We’ve actually been seriously thinking of putting Conner in gymnastics. I have a feeling he’d really like wresting too so I might put him in ju-jitsu or aikido when he’s older. Bella I’m pretty sure is going to be a climber. She will climb anything she can.

I’d be shocked to learn of any significant changes in bone that take place on a monthly time frame. But I’m not surprised to find a correlation to ACL injury, since hormones have profound effects on ligaments (as any woman who has delivered a child knows).

Look at a long list of articles here:
http://highwire.stanford.edu/cgi/searchresults?andortopics=and&pubdate_year=&volume=&firstpage=&author1=&author2=&title=&titleabstract=injury+athlete+menstrual&fulltext=&andorexacttitle=and&andorexacttitleabs=and&andorexactfulltext=and&src=hw&jc_favj=&fmonth=Jan&fyear=1812&tmonth=Jul&tyear=2008&flag=&RESULTFORMAT=1&hits=10&hitsbrief=&sortspec=relevance&sortspecbrief=&resourcetype=1&tdatedef=10+Jul+2008&fdatedef=1+January+1812&

The short answer: more injuries to the ACL during the ovulatory than in the follicular stage.

Very interesting. I’ll mention that to my wife. Thanks Brian.

Ahhh, but the plot thickens. Doing some more reading, I found a couple studies that looked at ACL laxity during the menstrual cycle or due to the effects of estradiol. Here’s the crazy quote: “Anterior cruciate ligament laxity is not significantly different during the…phases of the menstrual cycle….” So, if changes in the ligaments are not responsible for the increased risk of injury, what are the hormone levels doing to increase risk?

8 Ivan Wolfe on July 12th, 2008 9:31 am

Clark -

Even without the roids, strength training would help a lot. A woman/girl could learn (over time, with training) to do a 1.5x bodyweight squat or deadlift without getting bulky or “muscle-y” looking, yet too many coaches and athletes are afraid of having females do/work up to heavy compound weightlifting (whereas guys do them all the time). Instead, women athletes often do machines, which do little to help strengthen joints or tendons, and instead teach muscles to work in isolation, rather than together.

I really think strength training, especially the barbell lifts (mainly squat, dead, bench, shoulder press and pull-ups) are the missing factor here. You said there’s not much they can do, but I think you’re pretty much wrong there. There’s a lot they can do. These lifts have a broad applicability across the entire range of athletics, and they help prevent injuries (some people are afraid of getting injured while lifting weights, but as an activity, weightlifting has one of the lowest overall injury rates).

Ivan, do you have any references on whether female athletes are currently doing less strength training than males? Just glancing around, I got the impression that females are lifting weights but that is not having the same degree of benefit for them as for males (which is, I think, Clark’s point). One of the reports I glanced at (prepared by or for the Olympic committee—sorry that I don’t remember the details) focused on training female athletes on proper technique to avoid injury; e.g., knee over toe positioning when cutting.

(As an aside, it’d be interesting to look at whether differences in skeletal structure, etc. causes males to naturally pivot “safely” whereas females tend to heel pivot.)

10 Ivan Wolfe on July 12th, 2008 1:27 pm

BrianJ - I have no idea about the Olympic level, where I would expect females to likely lift weights in closer proportion to male athletes.

However, as I said above, many female athletes use machines rather than do the heavy, compound barbell exercises that are more useful for sports. Most studies I’m aware of make no differentiation between heavy barbell and machine exercises, so all I have to really go on is my own anecdotal experience with the athletes I know and notice.

Do you have studies that show high school and college female athletes do heavy deadlifts, shoulder press and squats just as often as males? I think if you polled the average athlete, they’d say women just don’t do the heavy compound lifts as often.

Ivan Wolfe: sorry, my request for references probably came across really snotty. I didn’t mean it that way. My experience with league sport is quite limited; I play a lot of pick-up and do individual sport daily, but no leagues. So I don’t have much to go on in trying to determine whether women lift weights as much as men. (I lifted weights for a year and detested every minute.) Hence, I was just trying to gauge what you were saying.

Brian J. -

Got it. I didn’t take it as snotty - I thought perhaps you might know something I didn’t know. I do lift weights regularly, and I read voraciously on the subject. I suppose I could dig out some of the books I’ve read and find the studies they refer to, but I’m in small town Alaska at the moment and don’t have access to the University library at the moment. Maybe in September when I get back to Austin.

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