ACL Injury Prevention

The ACL or Anterior Cruciate Ligament is one of the four ligaments in the knee. It is the primary stabilizing ligament and comes into play when changing direction. There are between 250,000 and 300,000 ACL tears a year and almost all of them are among athletes. ACL tears take anything from 6 months to a year to recover from after surgery.

Teach young players how to move with good alignment to protect their knees. Help them to develop body awareness, strength, and balance to support  knees and ankles. Have them to always jump, land, stop, and move with the knees directly over the feet. Teach them to not let their knees collapse inward. Girls must develop strength in their hips and thighs. Women are nearly three times more likely to have ACL injuries than men. And some statistics says that a female soccer player is eight times more likely to injury her ACL than a male soccer player. Researchers believe this may be due to differences in hormone levels on ligament strength and stiffness, neuromuscular control, lower limb biomechanics, ligament strength and fatigue.

 Make sure that they warm up and stretch before games and practice. In your practices have them perform a variety of drills until the movement patterns are second nature and they don’t have to think about it.  Teach them to say:

• Chest high and over knees
• Bend from the hips and knees
• Knees over toes
• Toes straight forward
• Land like a feather

Successful injury prevention programs may differ in specific exercises and drills but they share a common focus: improving flexibility, strength (particularly of the core, hips, and legs), balance, agility, and your ability to jump and land safely.

Practice these guidelines, exercises, and drills with your team. When practicing any of these strategies, the quality of movement, rather than quantity, should be your goal.

Warm up.

1. Light jogging. 
2. Sideways skip. Sit back, tense stomach as if you are pulling your belly button in, small steps sideways on your toes only. 
3. Forwards small steps. With you toes pushing up, take small steps landing with your feet flat on the ground. Your body is up right as before. 
4. Skipping. High knees, small steps, landing with your foot flat on the ground. Knees should be picked up as high as you can. 
5. Sideways skipping. Body upright with stomach in. Leading leg raised high. Feet flat to the ground. 
6. Backwards running. Body up right, reach back and drive with your heal.

Dynamic Non Static Stretching

1. Knee grab. Grab knee and pull up towards the chest, as the knee is pulled up rise onto the toes of the standing foot. 
2. Heal grab. Grab heal, pull towards chest and rise up onto toes of standing foot. 
3. Walking knee Lunge. As above grab heal, rise up onto toes, place foot forward, lunge down keeping body upright then step forward with back foot and repeat. 
4. Side to side lunges. Body upright, step behind front foot, sit down on crossed legs, push up and powerfully step out with front foot, rock forwards then backwards then repeat. 
5. Back kicks. Rise onto toes, kick back keeping everything straight go through slowly. 
6. Front kicks. Rise onto toes; kick up with toes pointing back to you. Keep knee straight. 
7. Front kick with skip. 
8. Hand walk. Push up position, walk up towards hands as high as you can go then walk hands out in front of you and repeat.