The Cross Over Movement Blog

The NY Times has an article about girls and ACL tears titled “The Uneven Playing Field,” while Vern Gambetta offers his thoughts in a post titled, “Perpetuating Myths.”Honestly, I did not read the entire original article, as it featured interviews with many of the same people and redundant stories.

Unfortunately, the repetitive stories fail to educate the masses. At the beginning, the warning signs are clear: too much competition, too soon:

She had competed in hundreds of games since joining her first team at 5. She played soccer year-round — often for two teams at a time when the seasons of her school and club teams overlapped…She had given up other sports long ago, quitting basketball and tennis by age 10.

Gambetta attacks the overcompetition in his post:

This whole article overlooks several key factors, not the least of which is the fact that in long term athlete development process the female athlete is victimized by a system that throws them into competition and skill development before they have the physical base of preparation. They over compete and under train and are coached by coaches that have no formal training as coaches and do not understand the needs of the female athlete. The system or lack thereof rewards the more aggressive girls who develop earlier and does not take into account the girl who not as aggressive. In addition there is an incessant search for athletic scholarships that causes the girls to over compete to showcase their talents.

His critique mirrors my thinking when I wrote Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development: no long term athlete development, compete too early and too often, no athletic base, coaches without training, and too much emphasis on showcasing abilities for scholarships without training to improve. This captures the essence of the book, as well as the purpose for the site.

Unfortunately, rather then being a warning sign to female athletes, athletes, parents and coaches now prepare for injury rather than training athletes to prevent injuries.

PARENTS OF TEENAGE GIRLS who play sports have grown accustomed to what seems like entire teams battling injuries — and seeing those who do make it onto the field wrapped in Ace bandages or wearing braces on various body parts.

I first investigated ACL injuries because I met four girls from a San Diego-area high school while coaching at a summer camp and all had injured their ACL within the year. I believed that if so many girls in individual programs were getting hurt, maybe something about the training or lack thereof contributed to the high injury rate and I wanted to make sure that I avoided the problem with the athletes I train or coach.

In the meat of the article, Sokolove tries to explain the difference between injuries in boys and girls by addressing hormonal and biomechanical issues:

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

However, his next comment contradicts his opening paragraph:

This divergence between the sexes occurs just at the moment when we increasingly ask more of young athletes, especially if they show talent: play longer, play harder, play faster, play for higher stakes.

As the opening paragraph illustrated, for many athletes, this occurs long before puberty, with many athletes specializing in one sport and competing year-round by 10-years-old.

Gambetta disagrees with the hormonal and biomechanical angle:

Sure there are physical differences, but the more we accentuate them the bigger they will be. Today the young female is severely short changed because of the constant stream of information like that presented in this article. Unfortunately this is what the parents, coaches and the girls themselves read and believe.

Why am I upset? Because once again we totally miss the point. Don’t set the bar lower because they are girls. Set the same expectation for training as the boys. Girls do respond to training.

During the NCAA Final Four, the ESPN analysts made a big deal out of stating that UConn’s Geno Auriemma no longer teaches the jump stop for fear of ACL injuries. Stanford’s Tara Vanderveer told me the same thing several years ago. Like Gambetta’s points, this approach misses the point completely. It’s not jump stops that cause ACL injuries. Stopping, in general, along with changes of direction are the sites where the injuries occur. However, it is the inability to decelerate properly and handle one’s body weight at game speeds which cause ACL injuries. Therefore, the cause is not the jump stop, but the inability to jump stop correctly. Gambetta argues that this is not a technical deficiency, but a strength deficiency:

All the BS about different landing and running mechanics is just that, pure bull shitake. Poor landing and running mechanics 99% of the time are due to lack of strength, the ability to handle their own bodyweight. You can blame lack of core strength, whatever that is, but it is really a lack of strength throughout the entire kinetic chain. There must be a daily investment in strength training as part of warm-up that includes exercises that are mindful and proprioceptively demanding.

I agree that strength is the underlying factor in many injuries. I am embarassed for high school girls when I ask them to do a push-up and they cannot. I find it even worse when their excuse is that they are a girl. That’s not a reason why you cannot do a push-up. Why do coaches allow athletes to get away with such behavior?

I see athletes - boys and girls - every day who simply cannot bend properly. Now, some of it is a strength issue and some is bad habit or poor teaching. For instance, coaches often ask players to sit into a low stance with a straight back, meaning a back which is perpindicular to the floor. This is nearly impossible. To train this position, coaches have players do wall sits. However, why do you need to use the wall to sit in that position? Because there is no way that one can stay balanced with a straight back and a low stance. The instruction creates poor movement. Rather than sitting into a proper squat, players bend forward with their knees to keep their back straight and their weight balanced. However, this position puts strain on the knees and it is impossible to move from this position. So, while strength is an issue, for many it is poor habits which contributes to the problems. Since players start so early, before they have a base of strength, they develop habits before they develop the athletic base. When they add the strength, they have to fix their habits.

Sokolove recounts an experience watching a game with a physical therapist who identifies players who are at-risk and those who move well.

She pointed out another girl with possibly even worse form. She was one of the better players on the field, but Silvers said her advanced skills masked serious physical flaws. I asked her if she could fix the girl, given the opportunity. “Yes, I could,” she said. “In four to six weeks I could improve her a lot. In three months, I could get the job done. I would educate the muscles, educate the nerves. She could build strength and change her patterns.”

I see players all the time who are labeled “athletic” because they look tall and fast running down the court, but they actually have terrible athletic skills when you really look close. They cannot stop, lack core strength, upper body strength and more. I coached an 11-year-old kid who parents called athletic who could not even hold hismelf in a push-up position, let alone do a push-up.

When I worked Cal’s Elite Basketball Camp several years ago, I sat with the athletic trainer as they played some dumb camp game called land-see-air. As the girls played, the trainer pointed to girls who were at-risk. I asked why she didn’t do anything. She said she asked the staff, but was told there was not enough time. So, the staff valued a game of land-see-air over a frank discussion or presentation on movement skills and injury prevention.

It is this attitude which hurts youth sports the most. As the article states:

Coaches rarely like to give up precious practice time for injury prevention, and often have to be pushed by parents.

Injury prevention is also performance enhancement. When a player can change directions quicker, and more safely, he or she is going to be better at skills that involve changing directions. Gambetta may not have finished the article, either, as Sandra Schultz from North Carolina Greensboro echoes his comments:

“Just because a kid is good at a sport does not mean she has the foundational strength or movement patterns to stand up to constant play,” she says. “What I’d like to be able to say is: ‘Before you engage in a sport, I am going to teach you how to move. And I am going to give you strength.’ ”

When I did a coaching clinic recently, I was asked what I would do with five and six-year-olds. I said that I’d tell them to do martial arts. I’m serious. And, this is one reason. By strating in martial arts or gymnastics, kids learn to move, learn body awareness and develop general strength before playing a team sport. These are all positives, especially since few youth coaches stop practice to train general skills. If players start basketball at five and only play basketball, they will have a very shallow foundation of athletic skills. Playing other sports and especially starting with some type of martial arts or gymnastics develops athletic skills which all sports incorporate and give players a head start toward performance and injury prevention.

Surfing the Internet this morning to find the winner of the TUF7 from this week because I missed (the show is my one reality show guilty pleasure, though I miss it more than I actually see it), I found an interview with Forrest Griffin talking about training his guys:

It was hard to tailor the workouts to the guys. Matt Brown and Jesse Taylor could do whatever you threw at them and ask for more. Nick Klein would work himself into the ground doing what you asked but it would be overtraining for him and he got worse over the course of the show. He did whatever I asked and never complained but he over trained instead of backing off.

Training a team presents the same problems because each is at a different level and has a different capacity. Some finish practice and are ready for more. Some finish and are done. Coaches have difficulty meeting the individual needs of players while “being fair” to the team. It’s part of the art of coaching, balancing each player’s needs within a team environment. Each player has different physical needs and psychological needs. Some players really need to be pushed while others can push themselves.

Few coachesworry about overtraining, though many player suffer performance plateaus because they train too much or too hard, not because they fail to train. Rest and the taper before competition is as important as the training, as without the rest and taper, the athlete sabotages his training.

It worked out well for some guys and not so well for others. But eventually the guys decided what they were going to do. I gave them workout options and they decided whether or not they were going to do that or go on the treadmill or whatever else they needed.

With older, experienced and mature players, the players should have some control over their environment. This does not undermine the coach’s role, but it does empower the athlete and put the responsibility for improvement with the athlete, rather than the coach. The coach is the guide, not a dictator.

I have written before that the best ball handling training is to dribble around a couple hyper-active kids who want to chase the ball and play. I also wrote that a dog works too. I saw this about soccer star Ronaldinho:

Ronaldinho has revealed that a dog helped him to learn to play football and to develop the silky skills and tricks that made him into one of the best players ever. The Brazilian explained that a pooch in his neighbourhood in Porto Alegre, Brazil would keep him company after the other boys in the area had gone home and would chase the ball around with him.

In my newsletters the past couple weeks, I have written about hamstring and hip issues several times. On his blog, Vern Gambetta tackled the issues as several Major League Baseball players have suffered hamstring pulls. He writes:

Based on my observations over the years here is my take on the hamstring pull situation in baseball and for that matter other sports. Too much emphasis on static stretching in warm-up.

I saw a basketball team start practice last night. A lap around the court followed by static stretching. My classic example of an inexperienced coach.

Flexibility of the hamstring is basically a non factor in hamstring pulls, it is dynamic hip flexibility that is important…The current rage in warm-up does not involve enough movement, way too much at walking tempo, you need to build the warm-up in a crescendo to top speed sprints…The hamstring is a transverse plane muscle that is stressed when running a curve and on deceleration. There is too much strengthening using non functional exercises in prone and supine positions.

Gambetta’s solutions:

More lunges in all planes, step-ups both low and high, more emphasis on running turns and at least two days a week of all out sprinting outside the game. It takes time and preparation with attention to detail.

When Shaq arrived in Phoenix, I wrote about the Suns’ Training Staff and Optimum Performance Training. Ian Thomsen and Shaq recently credited the trainers and OPT for Shaq’s sudden resurgence.

“His butt muscles, that was the biggest thing,'’ Suns athletic trainer Aaron Nelson said. “He knew that. We do manual muscle testing to show if a muscle is weak or strong, and it was pretty much nothing there.'’

Shaq’s base, Nelson said, affects “everything that he does, from being able to run straight ahead, to go side-to-side, to pivoting, stuff that he does normally. Rebounding and coming down, he’s got to be able to stabilize. That muscle is a very important muscle, and if that’s weak then you’ve got a lot of other compensations.'’

Shaq credits the Suns’ training staff with extending his career. It employs a system called Optimum Performance Training, based on a scientific understanding of how different parts of the body help or hinder each other.

“A lot of these teams have got the old trainers, who I consider ‘analog trainers,’ and they just go with the stim [electric stimulation] and the sound [ultrasound],'’ O’Neal said. “But that don’t really work no more. Your body is like a building, and if certain things are off [in the foundation] then the whole thing’s going to be off.

“I had pulled a hip muscle, and when you pull one muscle, the other muscles start to overwork. So with me pulling this muscle, all these muscles shut down, and then my ass muscles were starting to work. And that’s where all the pain was coming from.'’

In Miami, people blamed his weight and his divorce. They blamed those things that are easy to see. However, they did not attack the muscle imbalances, the weakness and the tightness.

“We figured out what muscles were tight, what muscles were weak, and we just corrected those imbalances,'’ Harris said. “He had a lot of general tightness everywhere, but mainly the hip and ankle.'’ [See next week’s newsletter for more on diagnosing tight ankles]

“He had some deficits that are common for a lot of our guys,'’ Nelson said. “But for a guy that big and that strong, he definitely had some issues we needed to address.'’

I have written about single-leg squats in my newsletter. Here is a program to develop the strength to do single-leg squats.

In Hard2Guard Player Development Newsletter Volume 2, Number 11, I interviewed Rob Elliott of Sports-Drills after I saw this video on You Tube.

I just finished a column on Swedish basketball for a future issue of Women’s Basketball (I’m a columnist). I chose Sweden because I coached in the Damligan (women’s professional league) in 2002-03 and Sweden’s u-19 National Team finished 2nd at the World Championships last summer, a big surprise. So, I wanted to know what had happened in Sweden to elevate Swedish basketball.

I interviewed Sandra Jansson, a player I coached against when I was in Sweden. After the 2002-03 season, she accepted a scholarship to the University of Miami (she subsequently transferred to Barry University in Miami), so she is familiar with basketball on both sides. Sandra, in some ways, changed my mind about warm-ups and dynamic warm-ups. I noticed her pre-game ritual, as she went through a number of dunamic warm-up activities. When I left Sweden, I realized that with 10 teams in the league, over 100 players, not one player injured her ACL during the season. I can’t think of a Pac-10 season that has gone by without at least one ACL tear, and it seems like the same can be said of the WNBA. So, while it may be a stretch, I wondered if the warm-ups had something to do with it, which is why I started looking into ACL tears and dynamic warm-ups and changed my perspective on warm-up activities (my team jumped rope before practice and started with light ball handling exercises).

In the email I received from Sandra, she made one comment which I thought was very interesting:

The intensity at in college is very high, but I felt that college was emphasizing quantity instead of quality. With TE [Telge Energi, her Swedish club] and Benny Johansson as a coach, we were all into QUALITY. Quality is much better than quantity. We never once – in 8 years with Benny Johansson, were punished to do suicide runs etc. His philosophy was never to punish players for certain mistakes. Sure if you made repeating mistakes in a game, you would be taken out, but in practice there was never a question of punishment. With TE we practiced between 4-7 times per week (depending on the week), and 2hrs per practice. With UM we had practice 6days/week, and with Barry it was 5-6days/week. Since UM and Barry wanted to practice quantity instead of quality, I felt that I was more exhausted while in college than what I was with TE.

An astute observation, as I have often felt that coaches organize practices to be hard, rather than to be effective. When coaching or training athletes, what is the goal? Sometimes, a hard, conditioning-oriented practice is the goal. However, is it the goal every practice? Does the intensity vary between practices? Do we think about the quality vs. quantity spectrum?

This week’s newsletter has an interview with Mike Reid, a strength coach from Gothia Basket in Sweden. One question discusses shin splints, as I see players frequently complaining of shin splint symptoms, something I never even heard of when I was playing. As always, I am curious as to the causes leading to these changes. In addition to Reid’s answer which appears in the newsletter, he forwarded me this research paper. Unfortunately, it provides few answers:

Results: The use of shock-absorbent insoles, foam heel pads, heel cord stretching, alternative footwear, as well as graduated running programs among military recruits have undergone assessment in controlled trials. There is no strong support for any of these interventions…

Conclusion: Our review yielded little objective evidence to support widespread use of any existing interventions to prevent shin splints. The most encouraging evidence for effective prevention of shin splints involves the use of shock-absorbing insoles. However, serious flaws in study design and implementation constrain the work in this field thus far. A rigorously implemented research program is critically needed to address this common sports medicine problem.

Last week, I engaged in a discussion on a message board about burnout. The consensus was that high school girls who suffered from burnout were either not tough enough or did not love playing basketball. I disagreed. The consensus suggested that college and pro players play year-round, so high school should be no different. I disagreed.

In the latest FIBA Assist, New Zealand Strength and Conditioning Coach Claire Dallison writes:

The periodisation of a basketball year is often a problem for strength and conditioning coaches…The between-season training and recovery phases are reduced to weeks and sometimes days as players juggle their careers…As a result, players tend to spend their whole career in a continual maintenence phase as they train to play and train to recover from playing. As trainers, we need to challenge players to develop as athletes and to see those changes in their games.

Without the off-season training and development, players maintain, they do not develop or improve. I watched a college sophomore last night who I have known since she was in 8th grade and she is the exact same player now as she was as a freshman in high school. Moving directly from a competitive high school season to a competitive AAU season does not allow an opportunity for a proper recovery period or a proper training and skill development period. As Vern Gambetta calls it, the development system has a “survival of the fittest” mentality, while ignoring sports science.

I have a longer article about this in this week’s newsletter, as well as an interview with a professional strength coach in Europe. To subscribe, go here.