If you hang around a locker room long enough, you’ll hear a harrowing tale of someone’s journey through an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear, surgery, and recovery. This long, sidelining haul is one that’s best avoided if you want to stay active, and there are ways to protect your knees against this type of injury.
At Victory Sports Medicine & Orthopedics, board-certified orthopedic surgeon Dr. Marc Pietropaoli excels in joint-preserving and joint-repairing surgeries. Still, our sports medicine team would rather not see you injured in the first place. We offer various preventive programs, including the highly effective Sportsmetrics™ ACL injury prevention program.
Here’s a look at how Sportsmetrics can keep you in the game with knees that are strong and healthy.
Before we get into our Sportsmetrics program, let’s look at who should consider ACL injury prevention. Approximately 1 in 3,500 people in the United States injures their ACL annually, and, in many cases, it’s a non-contact sports injury.
Your ACL is one of two stabilizing ligaments in your knee and is vulnerable to rotational forces (twisting your knee). The activities that have long been associated with ACL tears are skiing, soccer, and basketball, though an ACL tear can occur when you step off of a curb incorrectly.
Interestingly, women are more susceptible to ACL tears, and researchers believe that hormones and anatomy play roles in this gender difference.
The bottom line is that if you engage in a sport that taxes your knees, whether it’s skiing, running, tennis, or pickleball, you should take steps to protect your knees against injury. ACL damage and their subsequent repairs can take you out of the game for months, if not a year or more.
Sportsmetrics is a successful ACL injury prevention program that’s designed to decrease soft tissue injuries in your knees, especially ACL tears.
There are five components to the Sportsmetrics program, including:
The program focuses on strengthening the muscles in your knee, especially back to front, as well as the muscles in your entire leg so that your knees are supported in all directions.
The science behind this is that, all too often, muscle imbalances in your leg can jeopardize your knees. For example, if you have a desk job, your hamstring muscles can weaken, forcing the workload onto your quads. Through Sportsmetrics, we aim to even out the workload for a 360-degree support system for your knees.
Through this targeted training, Sportsmetrics reports that participants can reduce their risks for an ACL injury by 88%.
After you go through the Sportsmetrics training, the prevention efforts don’t stop there. To maintain your great results, we supply you with a 20-minute warm-up and maintenance program that should continue to protect your knees against ACL injury.
If you want to take the steps now to prevent a long-haul ACL injury down the road, please call our office in Skaneateles, New York, at 315-303-8352, or book an appointment with us online to learn more about our Sportsmetrics program.
