The Role Of Rehabilitation In Sports Injuries

 

The role of rehabilitation following a sports injury is critical to ensure full recovery, minimize time away from sport and avoid re-injury. Below is an outline of our fundamental components that are included in all successful rehabilitation programmes. 

 

1. Initial assessment and evaluation of sports injury. Collecting post injury base line measurements and tests of joint inflammation, joint range of motion, strength capacity and injury questionnaires. 

 

2. The rehabilitation intervention. This will change throughout as the athlete progresses through each stage but you want to have a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve at each stage. For example, 

 

Outcome Goal: Tissue healing and restoration of walking. 

Expected timeline: 2-4weeks 

Exit criteria: Nil swelling, full knee extension range of motion and normal walking pattern. 

Intervention: Range of motion exercises, muscle activation exercises, swelling management strategies and gait retraining. 

 

Suddenly we have created a phase of rehabilitation that is clear for the practitioner, coach and most importantly the athlete to follow. 

 

3. Re-assess and re-examine. If we go by the example above, after 4 weeks following a rehabilitation programme designed to help with tissue healing and restoration of walking, we need to re-assess the athlete before moving forward with their programme. So, we re-examine joint swelling, knee range of motion, and walking pattern. If the athlete has completed all criteria we can safely move forward and write our next programme. 

 

4. Advanced stages of rehabilitation. As the rehabilitation journey proceeds the programme becomes quite hectic, especially on the return back to training and performance. However, this will be completed in a similar format to above, outcome goal, intervention, exit criteria and re-assess. 

 

 

Monitoring athlete’s well-being, training load and its effects on an athlete to detect any progression towards negative health outcome and poor performance is an important part of rehabilitation. We use questionnaires, in person meetings and adherence data to make sure we are progressing in a healthy manner to complete the rehabilitation journey and return athletes back to sport. 

 

 

We hope you have enjoyed learning about the role of rehabilitation in sport injuries and the different components we use at Perform For Sport to help assist with recovery. The rehabilitation process is individualised to the athlete and is created by a skilled qualified practitioner who listens, assesses and conducts an examination to understand the pathology in order to write a rehabilitation programme. By addressing the dysfunction whether it is tissue healing, weaknesses or loss of range of motion, the rehabilitation programme is individualised to the athlete and their goals. The use of rehabilitation intervention, testing, monitoring, clear dialog and adherence to exercise prescription are some of the tools we use to achieve outcome measures during the rehabilitation journey. 

 

To find out more about how our rehabilitation team can help you, head over to our contact page and send us a message. We’d love to help assist with your sports rehab journey. 

 

To find out more information about our sports performance recovery methods, we have a couple of fantastic blogs where we share an insight into the benefits of a sports massage and the latest state of the art air compression technology to relieve muscle soreness. 

 

Finally, don’t forget to check out our YouTube channel, Facebook, Instagram pages.