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How Can Female Athletes Prevent Knee Arthritis? – WNBA Phoenix Mercury Athletic Trainer

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Phoenix Mercury athletic trainer Tamara Poole discusses common injuries in basketball athletes and shares how female athletes can prevent knee arthritis.

Tamara:
At the Phoenix Mercury I see a lot of injuries come through. It can range from the ankle all the way up to the neck.

One of the most common injuries we see in basketball is injuries on the knee. A lot of people actually that don’t play sports have these injuries, also.

One of the really common things to get is chondromalacia. Chondromalacia is wearing under the knee cap in the groove and the cartilage there gets swollen and irritated and sometimes rubbed away and causing arthritis.

So what we want to do for that is we want to keep our quad really strong and we want to ice, ice, ice.

There’s a lot of things that people say ice or heat ice or heat, I am always going to say ice because even though it may not feel good at the moment we are slowing everything down.

We are slowing the swelling down. We are helping the body control the process.

Tangela here, she has a little chondromalacia problem and we work on her all the time.

We keep her knee running as efficiently as we can so that she has less swelling, less pain therefore she can run harder and do more activity.

About Tamara:
A veteran of athletic training and sports medicine in women’s professional sports, Tamara Poole is the Phoenix Mercury’s Head Athletic Trainer. Just the second head trainer in Mercury history, Poole acts as a medical liaison with the team’s medical and organizational staff, focusing on injury prevention and management.

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