Ground Impact is not to be taken lightly:
In your next game,* each of your players will fall an average of five times, at least one will fall more than a dozen times – and if you count all players on the field: one will fall every 0.85 minutes.
In 95% of these falls, some part of a player will hit the ground hard, very
hard or severely, for example: an arm joint in more than 90% of the falls;
a knee in over 33% of the falls; and a hip in almost 50% of the falls.
Injury rates reflect these ground impact rates, for example: arm injuries are up to 33% of all soccer injuries, knee injuries are also up to 33% of all soccer injuries; and the muscles attached to the hip account for over 90% of the muscle strain injuries in soccer.
Ground Impact is always falling behind:
Every fall will take your player an average of 5 seconds to recover from, which in competitive soccer means that the ball is long gone.
To finish first, you
must first finish.
-
Rick Mears
Every fall in the second half of the game, will take
your player up to a third longer to recover from on average than in the first
half.
In 94% of the falls, your player will finish the fall on the ground, and then rise to their feet – which takesmore time and energy than if your players finished the fall by just rolling back up on their feet.
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"It
is not Falling that causes injury. It is Not Knowing How to Fall that
causes injury." |
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The discovery of falling patterns in soccer have been quite revealing and tell us a great deal about ground impact's unseen role in injuries and game losses.
This knowledge originates from Game Fall's Soccer Falling Database, which is quite large and constantly being updated. Game Fall analyzes falls for over three dozen factors, such as what caused a fall in terms of speed, direction and technique, how a person fell in terms of technique and sub-techinique, who fell and when in a game, whether there was a penalty or stoppage time, which parts of the body took the biggest hits and why, how long it took to recover, and answers for dozens of other critical ground impact questions.The facts below (based on professional soccer) are a sample of what we have learned about soccer and ground impact.
* professional soccer