ACL tear fears, TikTok myths and the fight for credible women’s health science in sports

Answers that, she says, were not yet ready. “W

Sarah Johnson remembers the distress with which female athletes uttered the words “anterior cruciate ligament (ACL)” . She remembers the word “epidemic” branded across newspapers and websites. But mostly Johnson, a postdoctoral bioengineering researcher at Stanford University and a fellow of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, remembers the intensifying demand for her and the rest of the women’s sport health research community to deliver answers.

Answers that, she says, were not yet ready. “Women across all ages are hungry for true information about vital health decisions, but there’s a lot of grey that we’re living in right now, with a lot of answers that begin with ‘it depends’,” she says. “A year from now, we might have science that says that in this phase of your menstrual cycle, your ACL injury risk does increase by this much.

“But as of right now, we can’t say that. ” The growing participation, visibility and financial heft of women’s sport, coupled with more women breaking into sport science research and decision-making spaces, has ignited the start of a sea change in the world of sport research. A system of models built almost exclusively on male physiology is becoming less ossified.