This is a question I get asked a lot and often a reason that people leave it longer to come and see a physiotherapist, because they think we will stop you doing the sports and activities you enjoy.
The short answer is NO, with most injuries, even traumatic injuries, we will not stop you totally participating in your sport or activity.
Waiting more time to seek treatment and advice can result in needing more treatment over a prolonged period than if help was sought earlier.
Why Do Injuries Occur?
1 – Trauma
2 – Non traumatic injuries occur due to:
- Increasing the load on your tissues too quickly, either from changes in your training speed or distances too quickly.
- A change in the biomechanical forces you are placing on your tissues by a change in footwear, running style or for other sports a change in equipment.
- Not allowing time for recovery from an activity. On average muscles and tendons take 24-48 hours to recover fully depending on the intensity of a workout.
- Poor sleep – we do a lot of our recovery while we sleep so it is important to make sure you get enough good quality sleep.
- Poor hydration and nutrition. With more intensive training we need to make sure we have adequate protein intake and there has been some link to vitamin C being important in tendon repair and recovery.
See the diagram below which illustrates the effects of too much load or decrease in tissue capacity leading to increased risk of injury.
Load Capacity Ratio in Injury Management
On your first visit to Grace Physiotherapy we will do a thorough assessment this will include:
- Assessing the nature and intensity of your pain. If you have a significant inflammatory component to our pain and your pain flares up easily then we would have to reduce your load from sports.
- Looking at your current training programme. From this we can then advise on load management to speed up the recovery of your injury. We may have to advise on reducing the load going through your tissues from your sport for a small amount of time.
- Give you targeted rehabilitation exercises to strengthen the tissues to be able to cope with the load that you are demanding of them.
One scenario that does unfortunately involve stopping your sport for a short time is if we suspect, from your history or assessment, that you may have a bony stress injury or stress fracture. It would not mean total rest as we can give you safe strength and conditioning exercises, cross training on the bike or swimming and continuing to “run” in the pool to maintain those running neural pathways.
In conclusion with most injuries, even acute injuries, we will not stop you doing the activities and sports that you enjoy. In fact complete rest is often the wrong thing to do. We will have to manage your load while you recover.
It is also advantageous to come and see us sooner rather than later as you will need less number of treatments, with a quicker recovery.
As well as helping you to recover from your injuries Grace Physiotherapy can advise you on how to prevent your injury recurring with a targeted strength and conditioning programme, this has been shown to reduce injury recurrence by 50% and how to adjust your training programme to achieve your sporting goals.