Sports Therapy & Rehabilitation

Goals of Sports Therapy & Rehab

1. RELIEF

   Treatment after an injury focuses on reducing symptoms and healing times as quickly as possible. Which exercise or hands-on therapy is most helpful depends on the injury type, severity, and stage of healing:

   Inflammation: the initial stage of healing following a new injury. Here symptoms are high and the emphasis is on reducing pain and swelling through hands-on muscle and joint therapies, and protecting the injured tissue through posture and movement modifications as well as education on load management and home care.

   Proliferation: this is the first of our tissue rebuilding stages of healing. Here our body is laying down new tissue as our symptoms are starting to resolve. It is our job near the end of this stage to move and mobilize the new tissue to avoid scar tissue build up.

   Remodeling: in the final stage of healing, our body is re-strengthening the “immature” tissues laid down in the last stage. Symptoms may be gone or mild, and it important to start the rehabilitation stage of treatment to return tissue function back to normal. Many sports injuries that become chronic or reoccurring do so because they have not successfully completed this stage of healing after the initial injury, leading to ongoing issues due to remaining weaknesses.

2. REHABILITATION

   Many soft tissue injuries often need rehabilitative exercise to fully heal. Often times rest alone is not enough as the tissues need stimulation to return to their previous strength and resiliency. Rehabilitation is done through graded strength training once the remodeling stage of healing begins. In this phase symptoms are often getting more mild and reducing, so it’s important to use objective testing to help gauge healing and recovery in addition to remaining symptoms (for ex. strength, mobility, muscle control testing).

3. PERFORMANCE

   Following healing, some individuals benefits from athletic performance exercises. These are sport-specific and focus on biomechanical needs of the individual. The goal is to reduce re-injury risk and improve sport related performance. For ex. plyometric calf and hip flexor strengthening for distance runners who test weak in these areas.

   Some athletes also use hands-on muscle and joint therapies to manage tissue tension and stiffness from high training loads to reduce the risk of injury and improve training and sport performance.