As an avid researcher and orthopedic surgeon in practice for more than two decades, ACL tears have consistently been at the top of the totem pole when it comes to the sports injuries I research and treat the most. In fact, it is estimated that of the 200,000 ACL injuries that occur each year in the U.S., most will require surgery to repair or reconstruct the ligament and restore normal range of motion — all with the goal of getting people back to sport or living the active life they love.
In the case of athletes specifically, too many in otherwise pristine athletic condition suffer the fate of an often season-ending (sometimes career-ending in extreme cases) ACL injury. Especially in what are considered high-risk sports such as basketball, football, skiing, volleyball and soccer, the ACL injury risk is even greater. My esteemed colleagues and I began to wonder: Are these ACL injuries an assumed “fate” that can actually be avoided? The answer to that very question is one I and a team of my colleagues set out to study beginning in 2000. The question we wanted to answer was this: Is there a way that painful and costly ACL injuries can be prevented in athletes across a wide spectrum of sports? That question took 10 years of diligence in helping to answer, but resulted in the establishment and fine-tuning of a program for young sports players to avoid knee injuries, most significantly ACL tears.
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The Prevent Injury and Enhance Performance, or PEP Program, was developed as the golden ticket for a wide range of athletes to increase their muscle strength, stamina, control and balance — all critical factors in preventing ACL injury. So how do we know that the elements of this program enacted in a deliberate way work to benefit players and athletes across a wide spectrum of sport? To arrive at this conclusion, we started with research on youth female soccer players and then took it a step further and enrolled players from 61 different women’s college soccer teams into the PEP Program. The results were resoundingly clear. After undergoing PEP Program training and consistently including elements of it in regular training, the athletes were collectively 72 percent less likely to tear an ACL during the course of the season.
An instrumental part of developing this program was discovering during the research phase that the deficit catalyzing these ACL injuries was not in the knee, but in the hip. In a nutshell, we found that when the hip muscles were weak, the responsibility was shifted to the knee, putting it into a stressed position and causing the ACL to tear. To combat this, we developed a specific combination of plyometrics, stretching and exercises to strengthen the hip, ultimately relieving the knee from picking up the slack.
[See: The 10 Most Underrated Exercises, According to Top Trainers.]
These exercises can be completed in as little as 15 to 20 minutes a day, three times per week, and are designed with sport-specific agility exercises — as every sport is slightly different in the demands it places on the athletes and their bodies. What is common for every sport, though, is the emphasis the program places on these three skills: maintaining correct posture, jumping straight up and down while minimizing side-to-side movement and reinforcing soft landings. Perfecting these skills in combination with maximizing strength of the hip muscles affords the knee a better opportunity to safeguard and protect the ACL. It’s also extremely important to note that the PEP Program should always be completed at the beginning of any exercise routine, to avoid fatigue that may influence improper body mechanic techniques. Any element of fatigue will contribute to an increased risk for injury.
[See: 7 Signs You Should Stop Exercising Immediately.]
As a direct result of the sheer amount of ACL tears seen in athletes presently, prevention programs will only become a higher demand, as they should. The PEP Program is one that certainly offers athletes (especially developing youth who are ready to carve out the mechanical habits they will take with them across their athletic careers) and their coaches/trainers the education that’s needed to take the focus off the knee and onto the hip, where the true base of prevention lies.
More from U.S. News
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Preventing and Reducing ACL Injury: a ‘PEP’ Talk for Every Athlete originally appeared on usnews.com
