O’Brien’s ‘Medical Mouse Trap’

There’s an excellent New York Times article here, which takes a very serious look at John O’Brien’s injuries.

It explains how each injury has helped cause the next as “his body became a game of medical Mouse Trap, one biomechanical problem leading to another in a debilitating chain reaction.” It also describes the techniques that have been used to correct O’Brien’s technique in order to reduce further injuries.

For anyone too lazy to read the whole thing, here are a few choice excerpts:

“In September 2002, O’Brien injured an Achilles’ tendon while playing with Ajax. He would never regain complete health. His body continued to break down, one muscle group trying to compensate for another and aching from overuse and repetitive stress.”

“his attempt to compensate for Achilles’ tendinitis led him to change his running style and that that overworked and stressed his hamstrings. He became too reliant on his calf muscles and hamstrings, instead of using his gluteal muscles to extend his hips when he ran … Video analysis determined that O’Brien’s poor posture left him pawing or pulling at the ground instead of properly pushing off with each stride.”

“The biomechanical flaw in his running style was corrected, O’Brien said, by getting his weight over the middle of his feet “as opposed to kind of sitting on my heels.”

“Last January, he began to work again with Athletes’ Performance, trying to determine why striking a ball caused pain in his adductor, or groin muscle. His mechanics were sounder when O’Brien, a left-hander, kicked with his left leg, said Omi Iwasaki, a trainer with the fitness company.

But when kicking with his right leg, O’Brien tended to slump and tilt his pelvis backward, leaving him too reliant on his kicking leg for power instead of generating a coordinated force through his trunk and hips, Iwasaki said.

This placed excessive stress on O’Brien’s groin, and like a golfer with an improper stroke, he began to scoop the ball instead of driving through it, Iwasaki said. The solution was to attach a bungee cord to O’Brien’s waist and to tug at him when he kicked the ball. This exaggerated the backward tilt of his pelvis and forced him to rotate his pelvis forward or topple to the ground, Iwasaki said. “He would go the other way so he wouldn’t fall over,” Iwasaki said.

Each morning, O’Brien spends a half hour in therapy with Hashimoto, the national team trainer, loosening his feet and ankles before he can practice. Each night, O’Brien has about another hour of deep-muscle therapy as Hashimoto kneads his body like dough, trying to alleviate the troublesome kinks in his legs, groin muscles and hips.”