Getting Game Day Ready

NFL teams use exercises developed by ChristianaCare to protect football players from injuries

BY JENNIFER A. THOMAS, MBA, MS, CCC-SLP

AT CHRISTIANACARE REHABILITATION SERVICES, we are relentlessly curious, and we continuously look for ways to innovate. In our quest to develop new ways to prevent injury, ChristianaCare physical therapists invented a new screening and injury prevention program that is so innovative that it’s attracted the attention of multiple sports teams—including the Super Bowl Champion Los Angeles Rams, who used this unique regimen to keep their athletes healthy throughout last season.

The program involves using a screening tool called the “core sling screen”. The screen tests the strength of trunk muscles, also known as core muscles, and is combined with a specialized exercise program to strengthen those muscles. Weakness in core muscles can lead to common athletic injuries such as strains in the abdomen, groin, quadriceps and lower back.

A study on the program’s success was published last spring in the Journal of Sport Rehabilitation. Our physical therapists presented their research at the NFL’s Professional Football Athletic Trainer Symposium, while athletic trainers with the Los Angeles Rams and the Baltimore Ravens met with our physical therapists directly to learn how to use it to prevent their players from sustaining muscle injuries.

Brian Catania, MPT, SCS, ATC, and Travis Ross, PT, DPT, who developed the program at ChristianaCare Rehabilitation Services at Glasgow, began working on ways to increase resilience in core muscles nearly nine years ago. Through their research, they developed the core sling screen, which detects weakness in those muscles, and they reasoned that if they could identify ways to improve the strength of the core muscles, common lower extremity injuries would be less likely to occur.

It was a two-part approach—the development of a reliable screening tool to examine the core muscles, and the development of a targeted exercise program to strengthen those muscles.

A randomized-control study was performed to test out traditional exercises and compare them to a newly developed exercise program that involved rotational movements of the torso, known as rotary-based exercises. The study found that the rotary-based exercises increased the activation of targeted abdominal muscles and could make adjacent areas of the body, such as the groin, less injury-prone. The study included 31 female and male students from the University of Delaware, and was conducted by ChristianaCare’s departments of Rehabilitation Services and Sports Medicine. Catania and Ross have provided further instruction to both the Rams and Ravens. In May of last year, they visited the Ravens’ facility in Owings Mills, Md., to personally instruct Ravens athletic trainers and physical therapists on how to perform the treatment.

The treatment has also been presented at the National Athletic Trainers’ Association and the Eastern Athletic Trainers Association annual conferences.

Strains are among the most common sports injuries, according to the U.S. National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

But you can be confident that if you or your employees need help to recover from a strain, or any other type of injury, they are making a wise choice by seeking out physical therapists at ChristianaCare Rehabilitation Services. It’s the choice of champions!

Jennifer A. Thomas, MBA, MS, CCC-SLP, is the vice president of ChristianaCare Rehabilitation Services.