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Comment by leemailll | Hacker News Reader

I remember years ago reading on nytimes that girls played soccer more likely to torn ACL, and in the piece several said theirs popped more than once

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I remember our wrestling coach constantly comparing the sport to womens' sports with higher injury rates.

"No need to be careful - this isn't [cheerleading|womens' soccer|volleyball] where you could actually get hurt"

That's a fun anecdote. I referee high school and youth wrestling and there are several coaches who are paraplegic or quadriplegic because of neck or spinal injuries they got wrestling. I assume there are other injured people who didn't want to have anything to do with the sport after their injury.

The male body is optimized for running.

The female body design is a compromise between that and surviving childbirth.

I remember that article from the NY Times Magazine, it was from 2008. Here's a link for anyone that's interested: https://nyti.ms/3ScsVm5

It's long but a good read, particularly if you've got daughters in sports.

It is an epidemic in professional women's soccer. At any given time a third of the top players in the world are sidelined with an ACL.

So what is the problem, they are pushing things to hard and too far?

Growing popularity of the women's game has meant more games and fewer breaks in competition.

That, and women's basketball, and women's ice hockey, etc. See

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/oct/19/las-vegas-aces...

My sports photography habit has gotten me out to all kinds of games and I've discovered I really like women's field hockey which is almost exclusively a female sport in North America. I was surprised to find out that men's field hockey is super big internationally, because unlike soccer, people in the US never got the message the field hockey was a huge international game.

Overall women and girls are playing more than, say, 10 years ago. But they still play considerably less than men and boys, at all levels, at least in soccer, and there are many, many more joint injuries.

My non-medical person understanding is that the physiology and mechanics in the knee are very different but beyond that it is a "no one knows" situation which seems shameful.

Again, have zero medical background and am not a woman but my mental model from my wife and daughters' experience and from paying a lot of attention to professional women's soccer is that it is simultaneously true that there are a huge number of physical/biological things when it comes to athletics that completely different in women and yet also that they are entirely unstudied. Like it is just a crazy giant blind spot.

It is more likely to happen when they are menstruating so they can get some protection by tracking their periods so that they avoid hard training on dangerous days.

Despite the downvotes, I believe this is true: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC164356/

It's completely true and part of best practices in women's sports.

Huh, I wonder what the mechanism is there. I wouldn't expect periodic hormonal changes to weaken a ligament.

Why not? There are androgen and estrogen receptors in many tissues throughout the body.

Correlation/causation. Could be as simple as being more tired than usual. Being tired is more dangerous for lots of sports, and is true for men as well (just not on a predictable schedule).

They're also more likely to get concussions from things like headers. The female body is just not as adept at physical activity as the male one. It's almost like its main focus is on creating babies.

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