There are more than 100,000 ACL tears/year in the U.S. ACL tears generally result in surgery, extensive physical therapy, significant time away from an athlete’s sport and friends, and a likelihood of arthritis within 10 years after injury. Most ACL injuries occur without contact, while landing or cutting. For this reason, the highest prevalence of knee injuries occur in soccer, lacrosse, basketball, volleyball, and field hockey. Females are up to 10 times more likely than males to have an ACL injury, playing the same sport. There are multiple reasons for this, but research studies have shown that neuromuscular training to improve landing mechanics can reduce the relative injury risk from 24 to 82 percent.

MedStar NRH-MedStar Harbor Hospital Sports Medicine has developed a comprehensive program to reduce injury risk. In the clinic, this involves learning a proper dynamic warm up, a targeted strengthening program, as well as a progressive plyometric program. Our mission is to help educate and train as many teams, coaches, and parents as possible to help minimize the risk of an athlete suffering this common injury.

Camps

Education Session: 1 hour overview of program with dynamic warm-up and exercise instruction. 

Clubs/Teams

Education session plus dynamic warm up and exercises.

• 90 minute session

Large-scale program

• Education session
• Dynamic warm up and exercises
• LESS Testing (video motion analysis of jump landing mechanics)
• Jump landing training and plyometric program

This will generally involve multiple athletic trainers and/or physical therapists working with the team over multiple sessions.

Learn More

Watch below as Justin Cooper, physical therapist for MedStar NRH-MedStar Harbor Hospital Sports Medicine, shares proper techniques to help prevent ACL injuries and make a full recovery.

US Lacrosse and MedStar Health

An ACL knee injury is one of the most common health topics faced by today’s lacrosse player, parent or coach. So, what exactly is an ACL injury? Are there best practices to help prevent it? And is surgery always necessary?

Find out the answers to these questions and more by watching this MedStar webcast, featuring some of the nation’s leading orthopedic surgeons, physical therapists, and strength/conditioning specialists.

Justin Cooper, physical therapist at MedStar NRH-MedStar Harbor Hospital Sports Medicine, is one of the panelists featured.