Physiotherapy plays an integral part in the multi-disciplinary approach to the management of sports injuries. The aim of physiotherapy is to treat and fully rehabilitate the athlete post-injury, post-operatively, to prevent further injury and to return the athlete to sport in the shortest possible time.
Sports injury rehabilitation focuses on treating injuries specific to you as an athlete and your sport, so you can return to compete as well – if not better – than before your injury.
Our Physiotherapists will conduct a thorough evaluation and create a customised rehabilitation program designed to help you reach your goals. In addition to treating an injury when one occurs, our Physiotherapists will teach you how to prevent injuries in the future.
Whether you’re a weekend warrior who wants to prevent an injury or treat a current one, a child or high school student injured on the field, or a professional athlete who wants to improve your game, our sports rehabilitation program will help you reach your goals.
Goals of Treatment and Rehabilitation
- Protect the injured tissues to allow healing and to control the early inflammatory phase.
- Rehabilitate flexibility, strength, proprioception, and muscle imbalance, and control physical activities with the aid of taping and splinting.
- Sport-specific activities must be tested to ensure the athlete can return to sport safely.
If proper rehabilitation is not undertaken, the athlete may be competing too soon, with residual instability, proprioceptive disturbance and muscle weakness and imbalances. Individual programmes must be planned and implemented per athlete. This would include sport-specific exercises, adaptation to new postures to correct muscle imbalance, taping and strapping and a home exercise programme.
Overtraining must be very carefully avoided in all of these phases, and training is monitored so that full activity does not occur before full recovery has taken place.
It is obvious that prevention is better than cure and your physiotherapist will always advise the patient on how to prevent recurrence of the injury on return to sport.
Helpful Tips for Athletes:
- Never train hard when stiff from the previous effort.
- Introduce new activities very gradually.
- Allow lots of time for warming up and cooling off.
- Train on different surfaces, using the right footwear.
- Shower and change immediately after the cool down.
- Stay away from infectious areas when training or competing very hard.
- Be extremely fussy about hygiene in hot weather.
- Monitor fatigue. If tired, ease off training.
Please call your Physiotherapist at a2z Health Group on (03) 9798 4081 or visit our clinics in Dandenong & Noble Park and Brighton Physiotherapy for more information.
Michael graduated with a Bachelor of Physiotherapy from Melbourne University. Since then, he has had over 21 years of experience as a physiotherapist and is also a qualified D.M.A. Clinical Pilates Practitioner.