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In 2022, Sweden turned the primary nation on the earth to permit physique checking in girls’s ice hockey. Main hockey nations at the moment are following Lund College’s analysis on the results of more durable performs on the ice. A primary research exhibits that nearly 9 out of ten gamers within the Swedish girls’s hockey league are in favor of physique checking—no matter their very own measurement.
“We found that interesting. The body size of participants in the study ranged from just over 50 kilos to almost 90. But we saw no correlation between body weight or height and attitudes to body checking,” says Amanda Lahti, first writer of the paper that was printed within the Journal of Power and Conditioning Analysis.
Medical registrar Lahti is a researcher usually drugs at Lund College and likewise works as a group physician for the lads’s group at soccer membership Malmö FF. A couple of years in the past, she was the group physician for the Malmö Redhawks ice hockey group, the place she received to know the goalkeeper Oscar Alsenfeldt. He went on to turn out to be Sports activities Director of the Swedish Ladies’s Hockey League, SDHL. When the licensed physique checking guidelines have been launched in 2022, he contacted Lahti.
“He was almost despairing and said that ‘this is going to cause a lot of damage.’ But I said, ‘we don’t know that, this is something we have to look at scientifically,'” says Lahti.
Now that method has resulted in a primary article. The fabric for the research was collected within the type of a questionnaire. Of the 225 gamers within the Swedish Ladies’s Hockey League’s ten groups, 159 selected to reply.
Gamers have been requested to supply their age, weight, top, hockey expertise and taking part in place (netminder, ahead, heart or again). In addition they needed to reply two questions on physique checking: “What do you think about body checking now being allowed in the SDHL?” with the choices “good, bad or don’t know.”
The second query was “Do you think the number of injuries in women’s hockey will increase after body checking are allowed?” (reply choices: sure, no, do not know). Eighty-eight % stated they have been in favor of physique checking. Sixty-four % stated they didn’t suppose there can be extra accidents. Once more, there was no distinction within the response of slighter-built gamers in comparison with heavier gamers.
Within the research, the authors speculate that gamers really feel that physique checking are one thing which might profit girls’s hockey usually—and subsequently it could matter much less whether or not they personally profit or not. It is a matter of “taking one for the team.”
Differing views about physique checking on women and men
Earlier than physique checking was licensed in 2022, the talk swung forwards and backwards. There are a number of methods to take a look at this from a gender equality perspective. Some folks imagine that women in ice hockey ought to have the identical circumstances as boys—with the identical toughness, leading to a sport that many really feel is extra enjoyable to look at. Others suppose that feminine hockey gamers, being much less bodily sturdy, shouldn’t be pressurized to observe within the footsteps of males with the intention to be elite athletes.
“But we might just as well ask ourselves ‘why aren’t we protecting the boys better?’—body checking can result in devastating injuries, especially to the head—also among male players,” says Lahti.
One reality, she provides, is that collisions (together with physique checking) are the commonest reason for hockey accidents, amongst each women and men. Earlier research have proven that when physique checking was not permitted in sure age ranges in North American male junior groups, the variety of accidents roughly halved.
Feminine-specific elements related to accidents
The analysis of Lahti and her colleagues is being carefully adopted, notably by the North American hockey superpowers the U.S. and Canada. The potential influence of physique checking in Swedish girls’s hockey might play a major position in figuring out how these international locations method the introduction of girls’s physique checking themselves.
Now the Lund researchers are turning their consideration to the accidents themselves: will they improve because of the physique checking, and how much accidents are being reported?
“Concussions are not uncommon in hockey. The cruciate ligaments are not as vulnerable as in football, for example, but in women’s football, studies have shown a link between ACL injuries and the menstrual cycle. It is important to study the importance of female-specific factors linked to injuries,” says Lahti.
Unequal mapping of hockey up to now
Globally, girls’s hockey may be very younger in comparison with the lads’s sport. There are a terrific many extra male ice hockey gamers, and their physiques have been recorded and evaluated for many years. This has led, amongst different issues, to heavier males’s gamers taking part in extra usually in a defensive again place and lighter gamers extra usually as forwards.
Lahti believes that this type of bodily evolution might additionally turn out to be a actuality within the girls’s sport—if the game continues to draw increasingly more folks and is given extra equal circumstances in comparison with males’s hockey. She attracts a comparability with girls’s soccer, the place simply such improvement has clearly emerged in recent times.
“This study provides important reference values. They can form the basis of more research into the development of physical conditions in ice hockey,” says Lahti.
Extra info:
Amanda Lahti et al, Bodily Traits of Swedish Feminine Skilled Ice Hockey Gamers Allowed Physique Checking, Journal of Power and Conditioning Analysis (2024). DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000005009 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39630128/
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Survey finds Swedish feminine ice hockey gamers in favor of physique checking (2025, January 2)
retrieved 2 January 2025
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