A free advice session for sports coaches is being held at Reading FC’s training dome – and it could help prevent serious knee injuries in youngsters.
The charitable ‘Power Up to Play’ event is being held in ‘The Dome’ training facility located at Reading FC’s Select Car Leasing on Monday April 8 from 7pm to 8pm.
The session is free and just requires all coaches to pre register, with the event organisers saying that it is relevant for all sports, not just football.
Grassroots coaches will have the chance to learn a specialist, validated warm-up routine – devised by world-renowned knee injury experts – which can help to prevent knee trauma in children and adolescents.
Power Up to Play is a charity founded by medical professionals in response to what it says is a huge rise in knee trauma among youngsters. It’s also being supported by Reading FC sponsors Select Car Leasing.
Evidence points to a staggering 29-fold increase in hospitalisations for dreaded ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) injuries over the past 20 years in young people.
Mr Nev Davies, a Power Up to Play Trustee and Consultant Paediatric Orthopaedic and Knee Specialist, says a dedicated short warm-up for grassroots athletes – completed twice weekly – could see a 50 per cent reduction in those ACL tears.
The free session being held at Reading FC will see coaches – from a variety of different sports, not just football – being trained in running that warm-up drill with their own youngsters.
Mr Davies said: “The main issue here is a knowledge gap and lack of education about the risk of significant knee injuries in young people. It’s a huge challenge.
“And the worry for me, as a consultant over the last fifteen years, is that it’s not just 25 year olds who are rupturing their ACLs, it’s regularly now youngsters aged 13, 12, 11 and even 10 years old.”
Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) gleaned from NHS data show there’s been a 29-fold increase in the number of ACL reconstructions in children and adolescents under the age of 20 years, looking at a period of time between the late 1990s to 2019.
Mr Davies attributes that worrying trend to a variety of factors. One is that youngsters are simultaneously more sedentary than in previous generations, while also being involved in highly organised competitive sport. Another issue is ‘super specialisation’, where a child only plays the one sport he or she is good at, rather than experiencing lots of different disciplines.
He adds: “For every one person having an ACL reconstruction 20 years ago, there are now 29 young people having the same procedure today.
“Education is one thing we’re passionate about, another is in getting grassroots coaches to make sure the warm up exercises are being completed correctly and with good form.”
The ACL is a ligament inside the knee which joins the thigh bone to the shin bone. It is most at risk of being torn when playing sports which involve sudden changes of direction – such as football, netball or rugby.
Devastatingly, the majority of those who’ve suffered an ACL injury go on to develop post-traumatic osteoarthritis (PTOA) in later life.
The PEP (performance enhancement injury prevention) ACL programme takes around 12 minutes to complete and features running, stretching, strengthening, plyometrics (speed and force), and sports-specific exercises.
Mark Tongue, Director at Select Car Leasing and himself a grassroots football coach, is delighted to help spread the word about Power Up to Play.
He said: “Here at Select we’re incredibly proud of our support of grassroots sport. In fact, many of the people who work at Select are themselves grassroots sports coaches and managers who truly understand the enormous benefits that come with playing organised sport from a young age.
“That’s why we’re fully backing Power Up To Play and the work of its medical professionals. And by highlighting the risk of knee injury through our network of Select-backed teams, we hope to be able to make a real difference when it comes to injury prevention. “
