Sports Injuries. Their Treatment & Prevention
Are you injured or just sore from participating in your favourite sport? Whether you are a weekend warrior or a professional athlete, the right treatment can help you bounce back faster and stronger, or even better, avoid the injury in the first place.
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Sports Injuries
Sports injuries encompass a wide range of musculoskeletal conditions (MSK) resulting from normal physical activity or from sport and can occur equally with both the recreational sports enthusiasts and the professional athlete. Common types of sport injury includes:
- Soft tissue injuries (sprains, strains and bruises)
- Overuse injuries (tendinitis, stress fractures)
- Joint injuries (dislocations, ligament sprains, meniscus tears)
Fractures caused by impact or trauma
Acute injuries (sprains, strains and fractures) often sudden onset during activity - Chronic flare-ups (shin splints, tennis elbow, runner's knee) that develop over time due to repetitive motion or poor technique.
- Postural and alignment issues that may lead to pain or injury
While any of the above can and do occur as a result of sporting activity, they can equally occur from any normal daily activity.
Who treats sports injuries?
Treatment of sports injuries could typically be carried out by a sports therapist or equally by a physiotherapist, and the overlap between these two professions is probably a bit confusing to the layman, so lets see if we can demystify this.
In fact, there are many overlaps in the skills in these two professions. Equally, there are conditions where one profession is superior to the other or might even offer a skill that the other does not have at all.
Sports therapists are trained to be more sports-focused, while Physiotherapists have a broader scope and treat a wider range of more complex conditions, including neurological or respiratory conditions. Physiotherapists who go on to specialise in post-graduate sports injuries will have in-depth knowledge of sports-specific rehab. Both sports therapists and physiotherapists, however, are equally able to treat the majority of MSK problems. Physiotherapists, after completing their training, will be familiar with a broader range of technologies. Sports therapists on the other hand are far better trained to provide prehabilitation and rehabilitation treatment plans.
At our clinic the difference in skills is further diminished because all our therapists attend weekly CPD and thus there is an ongoing cross fertilisation of knowledge. Also, all our therapists are trained to use all available technology, which means there is no difference at all between therapist types as to the technology they can call upon to help treat you.
In reality, the difference between therapist types is largely irrelevant to you as our skilled admin team will be able to determine who would probably be the best fit for you and at the end of the day, all you need is a therapist who can get your injury fixed and get rid of your pain.
Sports Injury Treatment
While we will now focus on the typical treatment of a sports injury, the same will apply to similar injuries caused outside of sport.
Typically, each sport is prone to its own set of injuries and hence the appropriate treatments are likely to differ from one sports injury to the next. In general, most injuries are accompanied by inflammation and pain. The first step is to calm the inflammation and this might require resting in addition to treatment.
The focus will be on hands on techniques such as strong massage and appropriate technology support, married to bespoke sport specific rehabilitation, stretching and strengthening exercises.
Prevention is always better
Most of us know the importance of rehabilitation following surgery to restore physical strength and function. Many of you, however, might be confused with the concept of prehabilitation aka pre-hab.
Pre-hab is designed to prevent injuries by taking care of weaknesses ahead of time and thus prevent them from developing into a more serious injury. Why bother some may ask, but once a real injury hits, the regret sets in, and you will wish you had spent that extra time looking after your body, thus minimising the risk of the injury from occurring in the first place. To make matters worse, various studies have shown that those who incorporate pre-hab into their daily activities regain full function faster and more easily than those who don’t pre-hab at all.
Most sports enthusiasts are 100% committed to their chosen sport and will go to great lengths to continue the activity, even when an injury is developing and continuation is only going to make things worse. In our experience, runners tend to be the most determined – there is no stopping a runner from running!
This results in overuse injuries being very common, which only get worse without treatment and rest. At some point things will get so bad that it forces backing off or even stopping. This emphasises the importance of prevention. Much better to be proactive and keep running.
- So what are some of the preventative tools we can apply to help:
Regular sports massage, allows a skilled therapist to detect variations in soft tissue, including muscle imbalances, which can then be corrected before they become serious enough to cause discomfort and injury. We cannot overstate the importance of diagnosis through touch. - Strength training. It is so important to strengthen the muscle groups that your chosen sport ignores. If you run and do nothing else, you will build up your quadriceps and calves, but largely ignore the posterior chain of the body, leaving them underdeveloped. A long distance runner will sacrifice muscles needed for speed, such as the hamstrings and glutes. Over time you will lose functionality and will begin to develop muscular imbalances that will ultimately lead to injury. By including strength training, it will not only reduce the chances of injury, but will also help improve your endurance, speed and enjoyment, plus help improve bone density and reduce the probability of stress fractures.
Running gait analysis is a specialised study of your running form. Research has shown that some of the biggest injury risk factors are linked to your running form, and that’s far more than just looking at foot pronation or supination. Our team use video gait analysis combined with industry-leading Footscan plantar pressure data to distinguish between normal and pathological gait. This technology helps us make informed decisions on how best to manage your injury, be it through bespoke rehabilitation plans, running technique and coaching advice, and if necessary custom orthoses. Aside from injury management, we also use our gait lab to help assess running technique with a view to improving running economy and performance. We can even predict overuse injury risk, which is the leading cause of injuries to runners. From the moment you contact the ground to the moment you push off, your stride pattern speaks volumes about your injury risk and running economy. By analysing movement patterns and detailed data about your gait biomechanics, we can determine how you could move more efficiently, improve your running economy and reduce your injury risk.
Conclusion
For the sports enthusiast, injury is an inevitable part of their activity. Most sports injuries respond well and quite quickly to treatment. And while we can usually get you back to your sport fairly quickly, there is no doubt that by adopting a preventative approach and being more proactive in your treatment, that you will avoid many injury occurrences. And not only that, you will recover far more quickly.
For those involved in sports which involve a lot of running, we can go one stage further. With detailed gait analysis we can not only reduce the risk of injury, we can also provide you with an ability to improve your economy and performance.