Landings, arms & resilience

Young Knees and the Landing Problem

Most parents of girls in cutting and sprinting sports have heard that knee injuries — ACL tears above all — hit girls harder than boys.

Fewer have heard the part that matters: how much of that risk is trainable.

Start with the honest framing

A serious knee injury is not a training failure, and nothing here prevents every injury. Contact happens. Bad luck happens.

But the risk is not fixed — and we should be straight about where the evidence comes from. The large randomised trials were run in soccer, because soccer had the numbers and the funding. We cite them as soccer evidence, applied to softball with reasoning you can check.

What the evidence shows

Structured neuromuscular warm-up programmes — the FIFA 11+ family is the most studied — produced injury risk reductions in the range of 32% to 56% in randomised trials.

In preadolescent female players specifically, a randomised controlled trial found the programme improved knee and hip mechanics during single-leg landing, in the directions associated with less ACL stress. Other work found improvements in knee valgus — the knee falling inward — compared with controls.

Here is the reasoning for softball: knee valgus on a landing or a hard plant is the mechanism, and softball asks for that movement constantly — the crossover out of the box, the plant behind a throw, the landing from a jump at the fence, the catcher driving out of her crouch. The sport on the jersey changes; the joint mechanics do not.

Why so few teams get the benefit

This is the uncomfortable part.

The reviews consistently report moderate adherence and limited uptake. The programmes work; they just do not get done — or they get done in August and quietly disappear by October.

The components are free, need no equipment, and take about fifteen minutes: landing mechanics, single-leg strength and balance, controlled deceleration.

What it means for your player

Two questions are worth asking wherever she trains.

Is there structured landing and single-leg work, or a jog and a stretch? They are not the same thing.

And is it still happening in the last month of the season, or did it stop when the calendar got busy?

If the answer is no, that gap is fillable outside the team — landing mechanics, single-leg strength, and controlled deceleration are the components that carry the effect, and they are exactly what we train and measure.

The framework worth keeping

The landing is the moment. Train how she lands and plants, and you have trained the thing the injury actually happens in.

This article supports our deeper guide: Landings, arms & resilience.

Ask about your athlete

Questions parents ask

Is this something she will grow out of?

The risk pattern appears around adolescence and does not resolve on its own. What changes it is training — specifically neuromuscular work that improves how she lands and how she turns.

Her team already warms up. Isn't that the same thing?

Usually not. A jog and some static stretching is not a neuromuscular programme. The structured programmes that produced these results have specific strength, balance and landing components, done consistently.

Where does softball fit if the trials were run in soccer?

The injury mechanism the programmes target — the knee collapsing inward on a landing or a hard plant — is the same movement a softball player makes fielding, running bases, and cutting. The evidence is strongest in soccer because that is where the trials were run, not because knees behave differently by sport.

Where this comes from

The claims above are not our opinion. Here is where they come from.