Female Australian football players at the sub-elite level experience different injury patterns to their male counterparts, according to new research from the University of South Australia.
Much like elite AFLW athletes, the data shows that South Australian National Football League Women’s (SANFLW) athletes are at greater risk for concussion and ACLs than male athletes in the AFL.
The findings, published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, highlight a need for targeted training, injury prevention strategies and potential match regulation changes.
Nationally and internationally, female sport often has less funding to implement injury prevention strategies.
Contact time between players is also a factor, as the research shows 75 per cent of injuries in SANFLW players resulted due to contact between players. Female Australian football has more tackles per-minute of match play than male Australian football.
Data by Yale Medicine– that first started being recorded in the 1990s– has shown female football players are between two and ten times more likely to suffer an ACL injury than their male counterparts.
The differences in male and female bodies can have significant impacts when it comes to sporting injuries, including anatomical, biomechanical, physiological and hormonal factors, according to Lyz Evans from Women in Focus Physiotherapy and Health, a female-centred physiotherapy clinic in Sydney.
A hormonal example is that research has shown there are higher rates of ACL injuries in women just before and after menstruation.
“The female body is not simply a smaller version of a male body,” Evans said, echoing calls from many in the sport science space to focus greater injury prevention efforts toward female athletes.
Source: Why we need different injury prevention strategies in women’s sport