I just saw a post on http://groups.yahoo.com/group/roller_girls/ (#17148) asking about the importance of practicing knee falls and mentioning skaters wearing small pads. I had no idea that there were still skaters out there NOT doing falling drills or leagues that don't require decent safety gear. But there are - so hopefully this will convince them otherwise. Knees don't grow back, and they don't heal easily. It just doesn't take much to really, really, fuck up your knees. And even minor injuries are painful and can be costly and require long recovery periods. Its not worth it. And if you're over 5'5" - you should really take this to heart. You tall bitches have the potential for even more problems with your knees than us midgets.

I have been very lucky so far - I haven't had any serious injuries. But I've seen enough to know its just a combination of about 90% dumb luck, and other 10% of the rest is really good, well-fitting top-end "vert" skateboarding pads, perhaps a million knee drops and falling drills, and maybe a tiny bit of skill that's prevented those injuries.

1. GET DECENT KNEE PADS
Do yourself a favor and save your allowance or whatever you have to do, but don't skimp on safety gear, especially not knee pads. If you don't know by now, don't learn the hard way that any fall can end your derby career. And your walking - and dancing - and bike-riding - career.

If I knew THEN, when I started skating, what I know NOW about knee injuries, I would have gotten $100 knee pads on day one. I have heard the arguments against: they're too bulky! They're too expensive! Pfft.

If you think good pads are too bulky, you probably need to bend your knees more when you skate. If you have good skating posture and a good stride, you are far less likely to notice big pads. I'm totally unaware of mine, and I wear the bulkiest I can find. If you don't have good skating posture, low to the ground with bent, flexible knees and a good stride - then you, more than anyone, really need good pads! They will not only protect you when your stiff knees or high stance gets the piss knocked out of you - they will also force you to learn how to bend your knees more, because all the really good vert pads have a bend kind of built into them.

Really good vert skateboarding and derby pads start at about $60 and go up to about $175 (maybe more). If you think that's too expensive, consider the alternative. I had one minor tendon injury in my knee once, early on. I was wearing street skating pads and hanging around talking to someone after practice and just whoomp! my skates went out from under me and somehow I strained a ligament on the outside of one knee. Don't snicker, bitch, it ain't that easy to knock me down, but yeah - I fall on my own all the time. Whatever. Anyway, that minor injury kept me off skates for 2 weeks and hurt like a m-f. I had full primary insurance at the time, so I paid $20 to my doc for a co-pay, then $25 4x a week for therapy. That's $220, if you're counting. And my knee still aches in the same place when its cold out, incidentally.

I don't know for sure that my knee pads could have protected me from that particular jackass fall. But I do know that that kind of injury is extremely common among derby skaters, and that pads CAN help. If there's any chance that spending $100 on pads now can save me the pain, money and recovery time - then its worth it to me. And now that I just have USARS and any real injury is actually a $2500 deductible - its a no-brainer.

Another potential way to guard against ligament injury could be knee gaskets. My sports doc said that he recommended against braces for people that didn't already have injuries - because he thought that it could prevent you from building up the strength you need to ward off injuries on your own. We'll come back to that idea. But in the meantime, knee gaskets for skateboarders (like the TSG gaskets here) have flexible steel inserts on the sides that are like extra support for your ligaments. And if you already have an injury to a knee or need a brace - maybe those could help prevent re-injuring your knees.

2. TRAIN TO PREVENT INJURIES
I'm a trainer for my team, and I'm very, very interested in ways that skaters can build strength and muscle around delicate joints to protect them. We're experimenting with strength training off skates that is specifically engineered for that. If nothing else, exercises on and off skates will build our strength and conditioning in general to make us better players. It certainly can't hurt, and definitely could help.

The most important exercise I think a skater can do to protect her knees is falling drills and knee drops. Both are also incredibly useful to you to become a better player - but equally important is that they teach your body how to fall right. The key is proper form.

Falling drills - first a definition in case you're not already doing them. In practice, its basically having someone blow a whistle every few seconds - everyone falls and comes to a complete stop, then gets up in a sprint to the next whistle. There's lots of variations - switching knees, must get up in 3 seconds, etc - but the basic is: whistle blows, everyone falls. We do them for at least 4 minutes every practice. Our refs love blowing the whistle more rather than less often in an effort to get us to complain (we're working hard on never bitching. Try it - it ain't easy). Critically important to this whole thing is PROPER FORM. Falling drills performed wrong are dangerous and WILL injure you. A good fall is a slide, preferably on pads (skin doesn't take it as well). There is no "thock" noise when your knee touches down if you're sliding.

3. SKATE A LOT
The more you skate, the more control you have over your skates. That can save you some pretty nasty falls, right there.