A month or so ago there was a Women in Sport seminar held at Latrobe University here in Melbourne with several speakers from different area's talking all things female sport.
I wasn't there but I was forwarded the online handout stuff which was the slides from some of the presenters.
I was chatting to long time women's football coach (maybe the most EXPERIENCED women's football coach in Australia, or at least one of) John Allen-Marshall about it all (he attended the event and is a member of the Aussie Rules Training Private Women's Football Facebook Group), and I just want to post what my developing thoughts on the ACL epidemic.
Bare in mind none of this is "backed by science" and are purely my thoughts based on my recent readings over the last 12 months or so.
JOHN EMAIL
Hi Troy
Forwarded the presentations from the Latrobe ACL Seminar
Cheers
John M
TROY (ME) EMAIL
Excellent mate - appreciated.
Just had a quick look but I'm more and more moving towards the camp that this (ACL epidemic) is not entirely a physical issue.
Taking that Katie Sheehan example that they used (in the presentation slides)...
- She put herself in the wrong position to change direction by overstriding (from the presentation)
- Why did she overstride?
- Because she needed more time to make a decision on what to do
- Women are thinkers where us blokes act on emotion (emotional decisions are made way faster than rational one's, hence why they aren't always thew best one's!)
- Women also think of the consequences of their actions a lot more than men so it means their decision making time is a lot longer (relatively), giving opposition more time to to close the space between them and the ball carrier
- On the other hand it as us men go through "less processes" with our fast emotional decisions, it provides us more time for decision making
- It probably won't catch on because it can't be measured like training can (strength, speed etc) but I'm almost convinced at the top end (AFLW) that could very well be the main issue and I'm sure it's not even being looked at.
At low ends of footy it's simply a lack or preparedness and simply by doing those warm up programs that are pretty basic can have huge effects (Footy First etc) - not to say there's not better ways of doing it either though.
We all need to remember that any sport has 4 co-actives
1 - Technical
2 - Tactical
3 - Physiological
4 - Psychological
And if either of these 4 things aren't optimised, and at most levels really 1 and half of them are at most, then this puts all players in some form of danger of not being able to use the correct problem solving movement style at the exact time it's needed, and that's what is happening with all these non-contact ACL injuries...I think!
If you've got any feedback on this hit me up at the Facebook page.
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