CLEVELAND — Sara Gennuso is one of the many female athletes who have torn their anterior cruciate ligament, best known as the ACL.

What You Need To Know

  • Females are more likely to experience an ACL injury than males

  • Dr. Paul Saluan, an orthopedic surgeon for the Cleveland Clinic, said that young girls are four to six times as likely than boys 

  • There are risk-reducing exercises that people can do that can help prevent an ACL injury.

Gennuso plays soccer and runs track at John Carroll University. In October, she tore her ACL.

“I just heard a pop and went down, and I knew something was wrong,” she said.

She now spends her days rehabbing her knee. Five days a week, she works with an athletic trainer or physical therapist and does exercises on her own time.

“We do a lot of balances as well as strength building and then I’ve started to build up my cardio,” she said.

Dr. Paul Saluan, an orthopedic surgeon for the Cleveland Clinic who performed Gennuso’s ACL repair, said young women are tearing their ACLs about four to six times more commonly than men do.

Saluan said he is seeing primarily younger women tear the ligament and it’s based on factors like hormones, more young women playing sports and biomechanics.

“When young women land jumps as opposed to boys their knees tend to buckle inwards a bit which then puts more stress on the ACLs. Some say its reaction time, when they’re hitting the landing are their muscles firing quickly enough to dampen the blow to the ligament or do they fire after the ligaments been put on stretch,” he said.

Saluan said there are exercises you can do to reduce the risk of an ACL injury. A popular one is called Fifa 11, and it's a program of exercises designed for athletes to do before practices or games to help reduce the risk of injury. It focuses a lot on hip strength.

“So that when you land a jump your knees are kind of going straight forward as opposed to buckling in. Well in doing that, you’re minimizing your risk of injury to ACLs at that point. This has been shown to decrease the relative risk of injury by about 30%,” he said.

Gennuso said she wish she knew about these exercises years ago.

“I do wish I knew some of the strength building exercises and my high school I wish we incorporated some of those preventive things earlier so I would’ve known and been in the weight room doing some of these things sooner,” she said.

Now, Gennuso is just focused on getting better.

“It happened and I was pretty upset about it but now I’m just trying to bulletproof my knee so it doesn’t happen again,” she said.