Sports injury rehabilitation deals with athletes with injury, helps them in healing, recovering from the injury and plans prevention from future injuries and works on earliest and safe return to the sport.
Injury recovery can be a long and tiring process depending on the structure involved. Common injuries in athletes can be ACL injuries, hamstring strains, bone stress injuries, MTSS and other tendinopathy. Where muscle injuries can heal fast, ligament, tendon injuries may take longer to heal due to compromised vascularization. Depending on the timeline and type of injury your physiotherapist designs your sports rehab program.
Acute and chronic injuries have different timeline to heal.
Injury recovery needs attention of a multidisciplinary team including doctors and physiotherapists. In few cases of ligament injuries and fractures surgical correction may be needed.
INJURY PREVENTION
It is very important to learn preventive measures to avoid injury in all cases. Learning preventive measures can save you from painful and tiring experiences.
Your physiotherapist will assess your current strength and capacity to provide a better strengthening program to prevent future injuries, If you are an athlete and you want to learn more about preventive measures and your physical strength you can visit a physiotherapist or visit (add link here)
There are few preventive measures to save yourself from unwanted injuries:
- Wear supportive gears during vigorous activity
- Focus on joint stability
- Maintain appropriate strength and flexibility
- Rest, when needed.
- Do not ignore small injuries.
- Keep consulting your physiotherapist about your physical fitness whenever needed.
- Train your body as per your concern sports
- Be positive and confident about injury recovery
In some cases, even after taking care of all preventive measures, an injury may occur once in a lifetime. As it’s a common say that ‘ Athlete and injury go hand in hand”. In case of an injury, planning a perfect rehab plan is your physiotherapists duty, this rehab can take up to few weeks to months to your return to sport.
You will need 8-12 weeks of plans after your injury to regain the muscle strength and for tendon and ligament injuries it can be longer upto 6 months.
In your sports rehab your physiotherapist will work on your muscles strength and conditioning, improve neuromuscular control and proprioception and joint stability.
Proper warm up and cool down is very important while while strength training
It’s a basic mistake even athletes do many times. Working on your stamina and strength is the key to perform better in sports but focusing on healthy recovery( physically and mentally) will be more helpful.
Points to remember when planning a workout to prevent an injuries:
1.Strengthening of major muscle groups like gluteal muscles, quadriceps and hamstrings in lower limb and rotator cuff muscles, triceps and deltoids in upper body is important.
2.Strength of abdominal muscles for better control.
3.Joint and ligament stability
4.Proprioception and balance training
5.Sports specific plyometrics.
For sports rehabilitation in case of ligament and muscle injuries, your PT starts with isometric contractions then gradual loading exercises, tendon loading exercises followed by joint stabilization and balance exercises are added. When planning for return to sports gradually plyometrics are added once adequate strength of muscles is achieved by the previous exercises.
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