Does everyone remember this when it first came out. The BBC did report on it at the time.
https://www.rugbypass.com/news/long-term-brain-damage-could-be-a-significantly-bigger-issue-in-womens-rugby-than-mens-says-lead-concussion-doctor/
The research was the first of its kind: it found that the impacts in women’s rugby were far beyond what had previously been thought. “With tackling, what we haven’t seen is those hard impacts that you see in the men’s game,” Dr Williams says, “what we are seeing is harder whiplash motion hits, with head to knee and head to ground impacts.
“The first time I actually saw how hard [the impacts the women received] were, it was somebody going head to knee, head to ground, with no control of their head at all; no conscious awareness of her body in space. That’s when my blood went cold. I thought the sensors must be wrong. That was when I went back, and I looked at all the data and I recalibrated all the sensors. I did all of the steps that you would do if you’re not sure that your equipment is reading right. And it was reading fine. And we saw those [high impact readings] throughout the season.”
Dr Williams’ latest work now explains the reason behind the whiplash motions we see in women’s rugby: women’s neck strength is so unfathomably low compared to men, that many women have absolutely no control over their heads when going into contact.
“Even just watching the Black Ferns play England, you can see that even the best women in the world have that tendency for that whiplash motion,” Dr Williams explains, “a lot less than the university women, a lot less, but they still throw their heads. The Black Ferns are awesome, but I don’t know if their neck strength would be on par with our university men.”
At the elite level, the lower body strength between men and women is closer, with men squatting around 100kg more than women, but men’s upper body strength is “triple or quadruple” the strength of women’s, Dr Williams explains. “When you get to your neck, there’s so few studies on it that it’s hard to generalise. When we look at all of the results we have got… the women’s neck strength has been considerably lower than the men across sports and across all levels of the game as well.”
There were a couple of outliers in the research, women’s rugby players whose scores are on par with the lowest of the men’s, but it’s a rare occurrence. That gives Dr Williams hope, she says, because it tells us that neck strength is trainable. “It’s not that we’re stuck in this ‘women have weaker necks therefore we’re always going to see these massive head-to-ground impacts’”, she explains, “it is trainable. That’s really awesome, it’s just getting buy-in from the women who don’t want to look like The Hulk.”
The England women’s team have been using neck training since 2014, one senior player tells me, to improve the stability of their necks. Some clubs in the Allianz Premier 15s have adopted neck training too, using exercise bands to improve the strength of their necks and hopefully prevent concussion. This research, while scary, is not a terminal diagnosis for the women’s game.
So are women more susceptible to concussion than men? “Absolutely they are”, Dr Williams says, nodding furiously, “and there are a number of reasons for that, some of which we can’t change and some of which we can.