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I've been thinking about Sam's injury and the ginormous amount of similar injuries in football and here's my fix. Make him wear tennis shoes. QBs don't need to be able to cut like RBs and WRS do. A little less mobility and a lot less rotational traction sounds great to me. Sam was barely touched on his last injury but his foot wouldn't slide and the forces were transferred to his knee IMO.
Read this and let me know what you think.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/when-athletic-shoes-cause-injury/?_r=0
When Athletic Shoes Cause Injury
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS MAY 15, 2013 12:01 AMMay 15, 2013 12:01 am 47 Comments
The right shoes can be important for avoiding injury on the playing field.Credit Brian Harkin for The New York Times
Read this and let me know what you think.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/when-athletic-shoes-cause-injury/?_r=0
When Athletic Shoes Cause Injury
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS MAY 15, 2013 12:01 AMMay 15, 2013 12:01 am 47 Comments
The right shoes can be important for avoiding injury on the playing field.Credit Brian Harkin for The New York Times
- PHYS ED
Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.
Sometimes innovative science requires innovative machinery, like a moveable, four-legged robotic sled that can wear shoes, a contraption recently developed and deployed by researchers at the University of Calgary to test whether grippy athletic shoes affect injury risk.
It’s well known, of course, that shoe traction influences athletic performance, especially in sports that involve sprinting or cutting, meaning abrupt rapid shifts in direction. In broad terms, more traction leads to better results.
In a 2009 study of soccer players and their footwear, for instance, researchers tested the players’ forward sprinting and sideways cutting speed while the players wore their normal soccer shoes, and again after the shoes’ cleats had been shaved down in length by 50 percent and then by 100 percent, meaning they were flat against the outsole. While wearing the shortened cleats, the players had less traction on the field and were significantly slower moving forward or sideways.
But these and similar studies did not establish whether more shoe traction is always desirable or if there is such a thing as too much stickiness in a shoe.
Athletic shoes have two primary types of traction. One keeps you sticking to the ground as you move forward. The other, called rotational traction, kicks in when you move sideways or shift direction. The amounts of each type of traction depend on a shoe’s outsole material and on whether it has cleats and, if so, how many, their size and shape, and how they are positioned.
For some time, most researchers have believed that forward-related traction does not have much effect on injury risk, while rotational traction does.
But that idea had been difficult to test in real-world situations. For one thing, researchers can’t ethically shave down cleats or otherwise alter shoe traction and ask players to don them and helpfully go out and hurt themselves.
And logistically, it’s easier to measure shoe traction in a lab than on a playing field.
But researchers at the Human Performance Lab at the University of Calgary wanted to see whether different degrees of traction would affect whether players got hurt in real playing conditions. So they created their shoe-wearing robotic tester. Mounted on rails, it can move either forward or sideways on a field at whatever speed the researchers choose, while its “feet” stay in contact with the ground and various sensors determine forward and rotational traction.
With this robot tester at the ready, the researchers recruited hundreds of local high school football players and borrowed their shoes. They fitted each shoe onto the robot tester and determined its unique forward and sideways traction.
The various shoes varied widely in terms of traction, says John W. Wannop, the University of Calgary kinesiologist who led the study.
The scientists then returned the shoes to the players and asked each team’s trainer to track all non-contact leg injuries throughout the season. This experiment was repeated for two more years, during which time the playing fields were switched from grass surfaces to artificial turf. At the end of the three seasons, the scientists compared traction levels and injury reports.
Many of the players had experienced ankle, knee and ligament injuries that didn’t involve contact. This was, after all, football. But the incidence was highest and the severity of the injuries greatest among those players whose shoes provided the most rotational traction. At the same time, the players whose shoes had provided the most forward traction developed fewest injuries.
This finding was unexpected, Dr. Wannop says, because it had been thought that any shoe with high forward-motion traction would also automatically have high rotational traction, and so would increase injury risk. But this was not the case; some shoes gripped as players ran forward but didn’t stick when they cut sideways.
Those shoes were the safest.
Playing surface, meanwhile, had almost no effect on injury risk. Injury rates were similar on grass and artificial turf, whatever shoes the players wore.
What these findings mean in practical terms, Dr. Wannop says, is that for the ideal mix of athletic performance and reduced injury risk in sports, a shoe should have “high translational traction values and relatively low rotational traction values.”
Good luck, however, finding precisely that shoe. Companies don’t advertise shoes’ traction values and probably can’t, Dr. Wannop says, since they will vary, depending on your body size and movement patterns and on such ephemera as the muddiness or dryness of a field or trail on any given day.
Still, there are some broad guidelines to consider when purchasing athletic shoes, especially for team sports like football, soccer or basketball, Dr. Wannop says. Avoid models with multiple large, toothy cleats or rubbery nodules along the outside of the sole, he advises, since they can create too much rotational traction. Look instead for groupings of shorter cleats in the forefoot, which can provide reliable forward-oriented traction.
Most important, try the shoes before buying, if at all possible. Ask the salesperson if you can go outside while wearing them. Find some grass and sprint, halt, pivot and cut. If your foot slips when you move forward or noticeably sticks when you pivot, Dr. Wannop says, try another pair. You might want to stick to your exercise regimen, but you don’t want to be stuck to the ground.
