Injury in sport has and always a risk that any athlete both professional and amateur take the minute they cross the line to participate. The risk of putting your body on the line in difficult situations and awkward positions and pushing your body to the limits will sometimes come at a cost. And in collision sports like football, rugby, and even basketball the stakes are even higher. But of all the injuries that are sustained in sports, the ACL rupture or tear would be right up there as the worst. This particular injury is a season-ending injury and even a career-ending injury for some! And with females, the chances of this injury occurring are a staggering 5-8 times higher than males in sports like soccer, basketball and more recently in Australia in Women's AFL. As opposed to collision injuries that are being in the wrong place at the wrong time, up to 70% of ACL injuries are non-contact injuries, meaning they were caused from a poor cutting move or pivot or landing poorly from a jump. This is not bad luck but something that could have been avoided if a correct training program was employed early enough that addressed the bio-mechanical warnings of this upcoming injury. Unfortunately, this rarely happens as fitness training is preferred over quality of movement. This article we are going to share with you the seven reasons females are more at risk with an ACL injury, and more importantly what you can do about it. Most of this information has been gathered by dedicated research and analysing the results of successful methods and programs used in our rehabilitation programs for over 14 years with athletes from all sports. We want to share with you the secrets we were able to uncover so you can avoid this horrible injury.

Of all the sporting athletes we work with in our Sports Specific programs, basketball would be my personal favourite. Having played the game from the age of 11 right up to 42 years of age at A grade level or higher for nearly all of this time it is fair to say I am a basketball junkie. I grew up watching Michael Jordan and saw the evolution of the sport having really big dudes who could hardly run, to what it is today with elite athletes and players who are almost 7 foot like Lebron James and Kevin Durant but can handle a ball, and move like a guard. I have also seen the evolution of guards with incredible skills like Steph Curry and Kyrie Irving who have incredible quickness and change of direction, as much as the ability to shoot. As with any sport practice of the fundamental skills like shooting, dribbling, and rebounding etc is essential but the little things that separates average players from great players will come down to the athletic movement. Being able to move faster, and with more efficiency than others is the missing link to taking your game to a new level. And this can only be achieved through a well designed strength training program. Unfortunately, most of the strength programs you see being used today are still using outdated body building concepts that will ruin athletic performance, not enhance it. In this article, I am going to share with you what the "basketball specific" strength exercises and methods are so you do not make this same mistake.

Our ability to walk, run and jump is all initiated by our feet. But it is not just walking or running, it is for any movement you do standing up, neural signalling begins at the feet as they are the first part of the body to feel the ground and tell the system what to do. The feet are loaded with thousands of nerve receptors that are very sensitive and designed to help us move. They tell the brain where you are, if you are balanced enough to move yet, and basically instigate movement before it even begins. The better the feet are functioning, the better the signal all they way up the kinetic chain, and the more efficiently we can move. Unfortunately, due to many factors ranging from poor footwear, lack of exercise, poor exercise choice etc, our feet become lazy and weak, and so begins the catastrophic destruction of our movements and joints. It is amazing the correlation between foot instability and knee pain or hip pain. I cannot tell you how many cases we have seen where the foot was the main problem with these injuries. Yet like many other injuries in the body, the area that causes the pain is rarely in pain itself. It sends the problems of instability and dysfunction to other areas. And to make matters worse our current health and medical treatments are ignorant to looking for a cause and hellbent on treating symptoms so this weakness or instability is often left unchecked and continue to cause pain and suffering. In this article, we will try to explain how the foot works and provide some simple exercise solutions to correcting any weakness and instability.