dr. A. (Anne) Benjaminse

UEFA Medical Research Grant - €30.000,-

Psychosocial stress as a predictor of ACL injury in female football players - Let’s take care of our athletes’ wellbeing 
There is an alarming increase in anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries in football players in the Netherlands and Europe. Youth female football players have the highest increasing rates of ACL injury. For ACL injury prevention to be effective in this target group, it is not only imperative how physical characteristics can be influenced by injury prevention training, but also to get a better understanding of how psychosocial factors may influence ACL injury risk. Psychosocial stressors contain fatigue, daily hassles and cognitive state anxiety. Ignoring such stressors or neglecting recovery will increase the risk of sustaining an ACL injury. If this relationship is better understood, this national trial will help sport professionals in effectively guiding adolescent girls through the development of adolescence and find an optimal balance between personality factors, history of stressors and coping to minimise the psychosocial risk of sustaining an ACL injury. Fo this, we will develop club guidelines for football associations in Europe on how to develop environments that will stimulate the players to engage in adaptive stress-recovery and ACL injury risk-decreasing behaviours.

Veni ZonMw NWO Talent Program - €250.000,-

Understanding motor learning to prevent knee injuries in sports: a novel approach 
In 2013, 970.000 knee injuries were registered for Dutch athletes, resulting in dramatically shortened athletic careers, work absenteeism, and proportionally high health care costs estimated at €1.5 billion. Despite intense efforts put forward on prevention, the relative rate of injuries has remained unchanged, attesting to the ineffectiveness of current injury prevention practices. 

The key concept used in lower limb injury prevention training in football/soccer is to teach the athlete to move optimally, such as jumping and sidestep cutting (i.e. changing direction), to minimize injury risk. The current common denominator of these programs is using explicit instructions and feedback regarding desired movement technique (i.e. internal focus (IF) of attention). However, IF is less suitable for the acquisition of complex sports motor skills. It is essential to improve knowledge regarding the effects of various attentional focus instructions and feedback on biomechanics when learning athletes optimalmovement techniques. 

The objectives of this project are to: 
1) examine effects of IF and EF on athletes’ movement behavior and retention when learning safe movement techniques in a lab-training. 
2) compare the same training conditions as under 1) in a field-training by measuring retention and transfer. 

To conclude, this project provides the necessary further understanding of how motor learning can serve as a novel conceptual vehicle to reduce injury rates through unique on-field knee injury prevention in football/soccer. 

PhD Projects