Many coaches, trainers and scientists assume that athletes know how to run correctly. WRONG! Many athletes don’t.

Many coaches, trainers and scientists also assume that athletes know how to change direction at speed (cutting) correctly. WRONG! Many athletes don’t.

It is often these assumptions that are the underlying cause of many non-contact injuries. Note the fact that between 50 – 80% of all injuries are non contact injuries!

Coaches often prescribe agility or speed drills to athletes without consideration of these issues and then get frustrated when the athletes don’t perform the drill as well as expected or get injured!

A piece of research carried out in medicine and science for sports and exercise by Dempsey et al. (2007) looked the effect of different “cutting” techniques on a number of things including peak valgus moments at the point of weight acceptance during the “cut”.

The term valgus refers to the outward angulation of the distal segment of a bone, in the case of this study the knee.

Previous research has identified that peak valgus moments increase the risk of ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) injury.

What Dempsey et al. (2007) found was that different cutting techniques produced different peak valgus moments. The technique that had the greatest potential ACL injury risk was an excessive outward step in the opposite direction to movement (around 49 cm foot distance from the pelvis), followed by a technique whereby the trunk was rotated so it was leaning away from the direction of movement.

This study provides an excellent basis for further research in this area but as coaches we need to identify athletes with techniques that increase risk of injury and modify these techniques. Even better than that, we need to teach correct cutting technique before we identify technique problems!

This way you won’t get frustrated and your athletes won’t get injured!

Peakspeed.net, helping you break the speed limit.

Alan Ruddock CSCS, YCS