One of my favorite subjects is treating sports injuries with physical therapy. Being a sports-medicine-minded physical therapist for many, many years, I’ve treated thousands of athletes in my career. I’ve actually been an athlete too, and received physical therapy following my sports injuries. I have a total understanding of this subject.
Sports-medicine or sports-related injuries aren’t just for professional, college, high school or club sport athletes, that is, people who are actively competing. There are probably more recreational athletes or ex-jocks like me who want to continue with a lifetime sport or want to maintain that competitive athletic mindset or edge.
My Philosophy of Treating Sports Injuries with Physical Therapy
I actually treat sports injuries with an athletic model of physical therapy treatment because it’s super important for the return to activity. We want a restoration of your normal motion and function. Not just for your daily functions, motions, and strengths that you need to accomplish your daily activities. Returning someone to their previous level of activity requires more training, more recovery, a more defined program so that they don’t further injure themselves, and they can enjoy it.
With sports injuries, there’s a myriad of injuries. I’m not going to get into the different types, but you can pretty much go by joint or area.
- There are all kinds of sprains and strains of the spinal area, the neck, mid-back, lower back
- Shoulder injuries
- Rotator cuff—people tear the rotator cuff or they get rotator cuff tendonitis
- Tennis elbow which is inflammation of the tissues in the elbow.
With tennis elbow, people can tear the ligament on the inside. I won’t get into the technical terms here, but they have that repaired for throwing injuries. There’s a particular name for that surgery.
One of the more common things you hear about is injuries in the knee. Anterior cruciate ligament, or people call it the ACL. Cartilage tears, medial ligament tears, ankle sprains, the list goes on. I’m not going to list all of them, I’m giving you some of the major ones we see in my practice.
Repairing Sports Injuries with Physical Therapy
They each require a different approach depending on if there’s a bony injury, or if there’s an injury to the supportive structures. Those are the ligamentous structures that give you stability. Those tissues don’t contract like a muscle contracts. They’re static. They’re there to provide support.
If you have an injury to contractile tissue, like biceps—for example, you tear your bicep, or someone strains their hamstring. A sprinter or a runner strains their hamstring. All of those require a bit different approach to the recovery process.
Nerve injuries can occur in sports injuries, for sure, and require their own type of treatment.
The Complexity of Sports Injuries Requires Expert Treatment
Treating these injuries can get pretty complex, but you have to be put on a program that’s going to restore normal strength, mobility, and function and decrease inflammation. More importantly, this program should prevent further injury when you return to activity. A lot of people try to go back too fast just because they’re feeling better. Maybe all their structures aren’t healed.
Also, when you’re going through a recovery period, you will potentially lose strength, mobility and awareness of your ability to correct your body in space. Say you sprained an ankle. If you don’t work on the balance, your body’s awareness of its position in space, and the ability to react to the ground so that you don’t re-injure yourself, you’re going to put yourself at risk. That’s why you need to be working with a physical therapist, particularly one who’s trained in sports medicine or athletic medicine.
Helping You Recover Fully from Sports Injuries
There are special tests that can be performed that are not just joint-specific tests, but functional tests that test your ability to function in the environment that you want to go back to. That is a really, really important element for your program, to make sure that not only your structures and tissues are healed, but your ability to move and function properly at your desired level of activity is restored to normal.
If you have a sports injury or someone you know has such an injury, reach out to Rebound Physical Therapy. We would love to talk to you about it and help you out. Call us at 785-271-5533. We love to help people recover from sports injuries and get back to the life they love.
Paul Silovsky is driven by the desire to help others reach their goals and live an active and healthy lifestyle. This passion is what drove him to open Rebound Physical Therapy in 1994. He received his Physical Therapy degree from The University of Kansas Medical Center in 1987. As a practicing physical therapist, Paul specialized in orthopedic and sports medicine rehabilitation with a heavy emphasis on athletic rehabilitation, sport speed development and sports performance enhancement for golfers. Paul and his wife enjoy traveling, cycling, watching team sports and spending time with their three daughters and six grandchildren.
