Sports Related Injury Rehabilitation:
Don't Let History Repeat Itself!

A sports related injury will not go away by itself. If you don't use the rehabilitation period to find out why it happened, it will come back sooner or later! Early treatment by a qualified therapist is essential to get a proper diagnosis and appropriate intervention.

It is frustrating if you cannot train due to an injury. But it is more frustrating to return too early, under-perform and complicate the injury further, because it will take longer to recover. Be patient and use the time to learn about your injury, ask your therapist or read up on your condition.

Know Your Enemy.....

If you are going to make a complete recovery and prevent the injury returning you will need to find out more about it and why it happened. If it’s a non-contact injury:

• What are the possible causes?

• Was it self-inflicted by over-training, poor technique
  or a bad decision?

• What can you do to help with the recovery process?

Take responsibility for yourself and don’t leave it all for your therapist. He or she is not repairing your car that you leave at the garage and pick up after it’s done. Learn more about your body so once you are fit enough to return to your training, you will have a good understanding of how to use yourself better.

Your body doesn’t come with an instruction manual (which we probably wouldn’t read anyway) so take time to experiment with movement.

See if you are doing something that may be leading to poor coordination - see my instant biomechanics test for a assessment of your patterns.

In the majority of sports related injury cases I see, poor movement patterns invariably plays a role.

Correct these and you will see an almost instant improvement - see my Peak Performance Training Program on how to identify and correct injury-inducing movement patterns.

Even a few weeks' break from training will begin to tell on your return. It is essential not to try and make up for lost time following an injury. You have to accept you are not going to pick up where you left off. Take the injury as a warning things were not going as well as they could have been, and change your approach.

Is Your Exercise Program To Blame?

If you are suffering from recurring injuries something has to change, and in most cases I would suggest it’s the exercise program that has to go. It is common for us to assume the exercise approach is right and therefore to increase our program in the belief that more must be better. I have seen dramatic improvement where people have stopped doing their exercises altogether and instead trained smarter in their sport, or added another activity such as swimming or running.

What are your exercises doing for you? Are they reinforcing your bad habits by using your neck and back muscles poorly? Is the emphasis on individual muscles? Did your therapist identify a weakness in muscles essential for your sport?

If yes, how long had you been playing your sport? Either you are not performing the movements of your sport correctly, or your therapist is wrong. If you have been playing your sport for sometime then shouldn’t you have the strength in these muscles?

If you do have a weakness then you are doing something wrong in your sport and the prescribed exercises will not ultimately change how you move. This is down to your concepts and coordination – neither will be addressed by corrective exercises that have nothing in common the movements of your sport.

The above text is an extract from my peak performance training program, 'Zone Mind, Zone Body'.

It takes a different look at what is needed to perform at your peak and comes up with some surprising answers. If you would like to know more about this unique book please click on the cover.

Want to ask a question? If there is anything on this page that you would like to follow up please feel free to contact me Roy Palmer

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