Sports Enhancement
Need help recovering from a sports injury? Looking to improve your sports performance?
Sports Therapy is the Right Choice:
Sports therapy, or sports physical therapy, is a specialized area of physical therapy that deals with both acute and chronic injuries in professional, collegiate, high school, and recreational athletes. The practice includes thorough evaluation, treatment, transition back to sport, prevention, and performance enhancement programs.
Post-Surgical Rehabilitation:
Often, sports therapists work with post-surgical athletes to help them recover their strength, range of motion, and activities of daily living. To accomplish this, sports therapy specialists use techniques such as:
- Manual Therapy: Specialized, hands-on techniques to facilitate movement, and functional control
- Therapeutic Exercise: Exercises varying from active range of motion (simply working against gravity) to advanced resistance protocols that help athletes recover the necessary strength to compete in their given sport
- Functional Retraining: Retraining of specialized balance, movement patterns, and dynamic flexibility and stability for athletes in their given area of interest or excellence, including helping pitchers with throwing mechanics; assisting football players in cutting, catching, throwing, and backpedaling; and aiding basketball players in jumping, shuffling, and shooting
- Dynamic Strength & Endurance Training: Advanced training programs instituted in the later stages of rehabilitation that closely replicate athletes' experiences on the court or playing field, helping them to regain their endurance, balance, and strength
- Other Modalities: Treatments including heat, ice, taping, and electrical stimulation that decrease inflammation, lessen pain, and improve body function back toward its normal state
Prevention:
Sports therapists are often able to provide interventions and recommendations to assist athletes in injury prevention. These include pre-participation evaluations, equipment advice, conditioning programs (e.g. ACL injury prevention), and cardiorespiratory conditioning programs that are constructed to assist athletes in a safe transition back to sport.
Sports Performance Programs:
Sports therapists are able to build tailored sports performance training plans to help athletes achieve their performance goals. This process begins with a thorough evaluation of the athlete's strength, neuromuscular coordination, flexibility, and cardiorespiratory fitness. The athlete's specific sporting demands are taken into account to create a training regime (plan of action), which may include multiple times per week coaching and guidance with the sports therapist, depending on the athlete's goals and needs.
If you or your teen athlete want to speed up recovery or maximize sports performance, we can help!
