It's a very common injury for running backs and wide receivers in the NFL and a few good articles and some medical research papers on the recovery rate of these athletes (that all rely on speed and power). Not all lose their speed and power, but the most reliable paper that I read suggested that about half of players with full ACL rupture will lose speed and power - this was over a 3 year monitoring period. The likelihood is that Jay will be slower and less powerful when he comes back, though this is by no means a definite. I have worked for a while with an elite age group triathlete who has had ACL reconstruction, who has remarkable run speed and continues to get stronger and faster. Admittedly this is for an endurance athlete and not a sprinter though.
Interesting. In a way, a modern striker/footballer can be a mixture of sprinter and endurance racer. They just have to be excellent at the ball game too.
Adidas have been working with JRod with his boots, he has a strange style of running kinda like a duck on speed. He may even come back as fast if he has worked on a more efficient running style
Long always reminds me of Jay running...like his spine is fixed to a metal rod. And Adidas did special boots for JWP I believe...because his style contributed to his foot injury.
If you mean that Jay was a bit 10 to 2, I've not noticed that. Might have a look at some archive. Usually people who are like that are a bit knock-kneed as well. Hmm..! [murmurs he probably reading far too much into the quote]
Long does have quite an odd running style. Ram-rod straight back, with very short leg lift and quick stride. I notice his arms don't punch the air either. He gets up to speed fairly quickly with it though. Mane is the one who surprises me. He has a long stride yet gets up to speed really quick by just using loads of power. The surprise is that he lasts an entire match quite easily because he's still doing it at the end.
Spider has one leg longer than the other, uses special lifts to keep his balance, his injury happened when he wasn't using them.
Read the beginning of that and thought you were telling a joke...A spider had one leg longer than the others.... Now I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to think of the punchline.
It's to do with the proportion of fast to slow fibres in your muscles...I know Ethiopians and Kenyans have great endurance and are best suited to the longer races. It is genetic, so nothing wrong with talking about such differences.
Michael Johnson didn't run too badly with that ram rod action did he? And interestingly, >90% of the population have one leg shorter than the other it just doesn't effect us until you do significant amounts of exercise. I use lifted inserts too now purely because I walk my mutt so much.
Everyone keeps suggesting JRod will be slower, when he returns, but how do you quantify that? Are we talking in terms of taking half a second longer to run 100m? Are we talking in terms of acceleration, from a standing start? A combination of both?
I'm more afraid he will hurt himself again...how often do we see players return from injury just to tear their hamstring.
