What is Sports Physiotherapy
What can Sports Physio’s achieve?
Sports physiotherapists treat a variety of injuries, including strains, sprains, and bruising/haematomas from tackles or collisions. Many injuries result from over-training, twisting injuries or explosive movements like sprinting and jumping. In severe cases, such as meniscal tears or shoulder dislocations, surgery may be required, followed by rehabilitation to aid recovery and restore function.
Sports physiotherapists commonly treat:
Assessment and Diagnosis
An accurate diagnosis is vitally important for sporting injuries to ensure you receive the right treatment guidance and receive the correct immediate care. Whether this may be for scans including x-rays or ultrasounds or whether the injury should be rested or kept moving with exercise.
Treatment of Sports Injuries
For an athlete, individual athlete or there is much resting on the quick recovery from an injury. The shorter the recovery time the faster the sportsperson can get back on the field playing the game the love. For a professional athlete an extended time on the side lines can mean they loose their spot on the starting team and even loosing a valuable contract. For any athlete, time away from training means fitness will be lost. This can be frustrating as this fitness or strength can be hard to gain, so any lost fitness or weight gained, can be costly on a return to play.
Return to Play
Returning to play is a vital part of sports physiotherapy. Athletes often want to expediate the healing process inorder to return to sports as soon as possible, however returning to sport too quickly can mean re-injury or potentially do an injury much worse than the had in the first place. Often a pooly rehabilitated lower back injury will result in a hamstring or a groin strain. A netball player who hasn’t addresed any instability issues may be at risk of an ACL tear.
Treatment Techniques
Treatments for sports injuries can be similar to conventional physiotherapy treatments however a particular emphasis will be taken on making sure the movement of the athlete is good, any muscular imbalances are taken care of and the technique of the athlete is improved.
Injury Prevention Strategies
Once the athlete has fully recovered from their injury, it is important for them to reflect on why they were injured in the first place. Often there will have been a change in their training volume which may have led to their tissues being overloaded and not fully recovered. This is a difficult line to walk as if they don’t train hard enough then they may not make the progress that they want. However it’s the sudden increase in load that often leads to injuries.
When a patient comes in with an injury it’s often to complete a full strength test of the surrounding muscles as there is often protective muscle spasm, or pain inhibition, which will reduce the accuracy of the test.
You also cannot test dynamic stability in an athlete who has a sprained ankle, however once the sprain is recovered the stability can be tested to ensure the stability is rehabilitated to an acceptable level.
If you need a physiotherapist skilled in the treatment of sporting injuries refer to our Grange physiotherapists.