What is sports physiotherapy?
Sports physiotherapy is a branch of physiotherapy focused on the prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of sporting injuries. The Physiotherapists at The Wellness Team have been involved in preseason training, match day physiotherapy, injury prevention and rehabilitating sporting injuries. Sports is a complex setting where athletes both representative and amateur push themselves hard to optimise their results. Injuries often occur during the season, sometime the injury is from a training error, such as over training or a sudden increase in training volume or from an explosive movement such as sprinting or jumping. Other times injuries may occur because of impact, such as a corked thigh or a sprain such as a rolled ankle and occasionally the injury may require surgical repair as with some meniscal tears or a bad shoulder dislocation.
The role of a sports physiotherapist is to identify these potential issues and minimise these risks as much as possible. Screening tools such as a squat jump to assess knee stability to manual strength testing to identify imbalances can be useful to help guide someones training. Technique is another important factor in injury prevention, while everyone may have their own unique way of moving, improvements may be beneficial.
What sporting injuries do we treat?
Injury screening
Injury screening by a physiotherapist is a proactive and comprehensive approach to sports injury prevention and athlete well-being. It allows for early detection of risk factors, personalized interventions, and data-driven decision-making to support athletes in achieving their best performance while minimizing the risk of injuries.
Rehabilitation
The role of the sports physiotherapist in rehabilitating injuries include
- Assessing the injury
- Treatment planning
- Functional rehabilitation
- Manual therapy
- Strapping or bracing
- Education
- Strengthening and conditioning
- Improving techniques
- Communication with coaches
- Return to play
Preventing re-injury
A complete rehabilitation plan by the sports physiotherapist is essential to prevent re injury. Restoring your strength of the affected limb to match the opposite side is one such task. Another is to assess why the injury occurred in the first place. Often there will be a training error, a technique fault, an equipment error or some general conditioning that needs to be addressed.
To learn more about injuries and why they occur, click on the link.