Home › Blog › Do You Want to Prevent ACL Injury? Beef Up Your Hammys…

How can you prevent ACL injury? The ACL ligament is a major front-back stabilizer of the knee. It’s often injured on jumping and then landing. As a result a research team at the University of Oregon recently tried to find out which conditions on landing were more or less likely to result in ACL injury. They took 36 young men and women and had them perform a double legged jump while capturing data with a 3D movement system integrated with a landing plate that measured force. Since the ACL prevents the tibia from moving forward on the femur, they measured how far forward the tibia moved upon landing and compared that to many parameters including hamstring stiffness. The stiffer hamstrings (read stronger) the subject had, the less the ACL was stressed on landing. The upshot? This makes sense, as the hamstrings attach to the back of the tibia and are in a good place to aide the ACL in preventing the tibia from moving forward when landing. So if you’re concerned about ACL injury, making your hamstrings strong may be a good bet!

Chris Centeno, MD is a specialist in regenerative medicine and the new field of Interventional Orthopedics. Centeno pioneered orthopedic stem cell procedures in 2005 and is responsible for a large amount of the published research on stem cell use for orthopedic applications. View Profile