Insights into Female Athletes
Reflecting on some learnings at the Bond University Research Week discussing female athlete injuries. Here are some considerations and insights from physiotherapists, sport dieticians, and clinical researchers.
Experiential consideration: Consider who is across from you. The young female across from you may struggle to identify the physical or psychological emotions underpinning their experience. With that said, it is about creating a safe space for the person to share information to the best of their ability. I love this one. You may be their first experience in healthcare. We need to be great in this area.
Nutritional: thinking about nutrition facilitators. My favourite idea was “getting older athletes to model their behaviour by going public.” A positive way to use social media is to show young girls a strong image of performance with healthy eating habits. Modelled behaviour is a great catalyst because hearing it from a professional or a parent may not resonate the way an older peer might. What a great idea to bring healthy eating into the space. Time and time again we see girls worried about weight so they don't eat and dont tell anyone they are not eating! We need to support the youth better here with education.
ACL injury factors: physical, biological, sociocultural, environment. Consider the last two factors. Growing up, boys play more rough. Girls typically receive less exposure to contact growing up so when they get into sport intensely at the age of 12-18, they represent a mucher higher proportion of injuries. This may be due to lack of familiarization and specialized training.
Ideas for change include the implementation of injury prevention programs and injury surveillance systems to be put in place which will continue to evolve with newer technology. There is good research for injury prevention programs. Although, there is lots of debate as to how much specificity matters.
In my opinion, an injury prevention program has become just a trend to sell. Intelligent programming for a young athlete should be preventative. There is nothing inherently different. Training to perform should make you more resilient to injury. It is a more optimistic way to think about movement. Train to perform. Don't train not to get hurt.
An injury prevention program should be every program a coach or therapist makes. Injured or not. The goal with the program is considering sport and life demands and working backwards. What biomechanics and forces are necessary for the demands, where are they vulnerable? Build your individual from there. Train what they suck at. Give them variability. Injury occurs with lack of movement options, lack of preparation, and to be honest, sometimes just bad luck!
To support your athletes best, give them confidence, give them a variety of intensity, and a bandwidth of movement experiences so their body can learn to orient and explore resisting and producing forces.
