Is Pain or Injury Keeping You From Exercising?
“Movement is medicine” has become a health mantra for good reason. Exercise doesn’t just help us live longer. It helps us live better. Yet when pain or injury enters the picture, working out may start to feel like it’s working against us.
What’s more, women are lifting heavier, training harder, and redefining what strength looks like. But the fitness playbook we’re following isn’t based on female physiology—largely because that research still doesn’t exist—and it leaves too many of us vulnerable to preventable injuries.
Dr. Kathryn Ackerman is on a mission to change that. A leading sports medicine physician, former Team USA rower, and co-founder of the new Women’s Health, Sports & Performance Institute (WHSP), she is helping redefine how women train across the lifespan. WHSP’s mission is simple but powerful: to help every woman—from professional athletes to those simply aiming to hit the recommended 150 minutes of exercise a week—move our bodies in a way that enhances our longevity.
Here, Dr. Ackerman shares the essential information all of us need to know to avoid injury, be consistent with our workouts, and stay strong for decades to come.
A CONVERSATION WITH KATHRYN ACKERMAN, MD
Women are getting the message that we need to strength train and exercise more intensely than our mother’s generation was taught to believe. Are there risks too many of us are ignoring when it comes to training safely?
We know that women can have more ligamentous laxity, which means we have to work on our nerves and muscular control. We need to learn how to jump in ways that are going to be more protective for our knees as we go through adolescence and beyond. If we can teach this to our young female athletes, they’ll already have those good movement patterns as they get older.
As we get older and things start to change, we become more prone to injury, and our biomechanics are a little different. To stay active, we really have to take care of our weakest link. Anybody who’s gone to physical therapy knows that there are exercises that are boring—ones you have to do if you want to get back to your favorite activity. This becomes even more important as we age.
Many of us—even high-level athletes—want to focus on what we like and throw away the part that isn’t fun. But to be physically active for a long time, you have to take care of all those little aches and pains, do the physical therapy exercises, and do the recovery work to make sure that you can come back the next day and be able to perform those movements in a healthy way, rather than giving into bad patterns.
Let’s talk about the research gap we have when it comes to female athlete research vs. male athlete research. Are we still basing female athlete care on male data?
Investment in women’s sports has surged about four and a half times faster than men’s in the last few years. But less than 10 percent of sports medicine research is conducted exclusively in women. There’s all this investment in women’s talent and athleticism, but we’re not keeping pace with what we should be learning about women’s physiology so we can make recommendations based on who women really are. We’re still applying what we learned from men.
What’s the impact of this?
There are multiple impacts. For example, we know that female athletes are two to eight times more likely to experience an ACL tear than males. And if that happens in adolescence, it affects a girl’s identity. Oftentimes, these girls pull out of sports. They need surgery. They are now feeling isolated. Some go on to develop eating disorders. They might not go back to their sport for fear of getting re-injured. And so we’re losing these athletes that really should stay in the athlete pool.
For many years now, we’re seeing female athletes learn how to work through pregnancy and postpartum. We see athletes like Lindsey Vonn, who are unbelievably tough, come back injury after injury. Imagine if we had a bigger pool of talent from a younger age and kept them around for another 20 years.
I think we’re missing out on an opportunity to see women really blow our minds in terms of what they can accomplish and the barriers and records that they can break. We’re also missing an opportunity to keep young girls and women very active and healthy throughout their life.
How do we cut through the noise on social media about what we “should” be doing when it comes to exercise?
First, find trusted sources and get your information from them. This is one of the reasons we wanted to launch our institute and website. Rather than going to TikTok and finding the most attractive person providing information about whether or not you should wear a weighted vest or take a certain supplement, we want people to know that they can trust what we’re doing. We work with an international group of researchers and have a very high standard. We’re not going to put information out there before it’s well researched.
What do female athletes know that all of us can learn from?
I think this generation of female athletes has been particularly inspiring. At this winter Olympics, we’ll see a lot of mothers. These female athletes are showing us that you can keep competing. Now, we need to give them the support they need—for example, a place to pump, the ability to have their child in the Olympic Village, or the financial support they need to continue to train.
The narrative has really changed as we see moms often come back to their sport much more grounded. They’re competing for a different reason. They feel like inspiring their own children. They’re more relaxed about some of the things and the setbacks they face because they know that there are other important things in their life now. I believe being a mom and coming back at an elite level makes for better athletes.
You co-founded the Women’s Health, Sports & Performance Institute, a first-of-its-kind organization for female athletes. Why has this been such a passion of yours?
When I finished rowing at an elite level in 2000, I contacted the US Olympic Committee, which is what it was called back then. I said, “I would love to know what happens to female athletes after they retire from elite sport. Do they have issues with fertility, stress fractures, eating disorders, or other health complaints? At the time, the USOC said, “Oh, you cannot ask our athletes that. You cannot look into our database and contact them. We don’t want to find out, because we don’t have the resources to deal with it.” That led me on a path I was on when I was in medical school to design my career so I could address these things. What is it that’s important to female athletes? What do we still need to learn? And how can we actually treat female athletes and give them the knowledge they need to prevent injuries and really thrive?
With funding from Clara Wu and Dave and Jean Ott, who are wonderful philanthropists, we’ve been able to raise over $50 million and start this institute. The nice thing is it’s all under one roof—clinical care, research, training, and education all in one place. Women are desperate for answers, and I wanted them to be able to come to a place where there was an integrated engine—where we’re making the discoveries and we’re also asking questions because we’re seeing real patients in the clinic. I wanted to create a place where these two things feed each other, so we can get information to athletes and to our patients more quickly.
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