Rich_NL
Rugby Expert
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Interesting coincidence given the recent tackling trials - I have a couple of interns working in my group at work (I'm an engineer), and was chatting to their academic supervisor. He's a biomechanical engineer too, and he's been looking into rugby injuries.
He linked me to a couple of papers that look at head motion in the tackle. These were not dealing with concussion, but cognitive impairment from chronic low-grade head injuries. As found for boxers and footballers, having your head shaken about for years damages your mental performance even if you're never concussed. Old rugby players perform worse than average on things like visual memory, reaction time, motor processing and so on. Two of the main predictors of this damage is acceleration of the head, and how fast the head is spun from a contact (the rotational acceleration).
Analysing many professional tackles, they found that tackling against the upper torso (and not bending from the hip) increased the accelerations by 80-120% for the tackler, and inertial loads on the ball carrier's head (the 'whiplash' caused by a body impact moving the head) by 120-600%
It's ongoing and not definitive research, there are several angles to be explored, etc... but in terms of long-term cognitive health and youth training, it's definitely a positive step to encourage low tackling (assuming head-knee injuries aren't significantly more common than head-head, say). I wonder if someone at WR is aiming at this but using the concussion argument to simplify the case?
He linked me to a couple of papers that look at head motion in the tackle. These were not dealing with concussion, but cognitive impairment from chronic low-grade head injuries. As found for boxers and footballers, having your head shaken about for years damages your mental performance even if you're never concussed. Old rugby players perform worse than average on things like visual memory, reaction time, motor processing and so on. Two of the main predictors of this damage is acceleration of the head, and how fast the head is spun from a contact (the rotational acceleration).
Analysing many professional tackles, they found that tackling against the upper torso (and not bending from the hip) increased the accelerations by 80-120% for the tackler, and inertial loads on the ball carrier's head (the 'whiplash' caused by a body impact moving the head) by 120-600%
It's ongoing and not definitive research, there are several angles to be explored, etc... but in terms of long-term cognitive health and youth training, it's definitely a positive step to encourage low tackling (assuming head-knee injuries aren't significantly more common than head-head, say). I wonder if someone at WR is aiming at this but using the concussion argument to simplify the case?