If you’re an athlete in reasonably good health, you might think that you don’t need sports therapy. After all, isn’t physical therapy something you’d only use if you get injured? Actually, physical therapy offers many other benefits as well.
Sports therapy goes beyond recovery from injuries or health conditions. A sports therapist is a type of physical therapist who focuses on the overall physical well-being of their patients, who are primarily athletes. While sports therapists do offer care in the event of an injury, their primary focus is on helping healthy athletes optimize their performance.
This can include things like helping athletes build their endurance or training them in injury prevention techniques. This is especially important since injuries among young athletes are on the rise. A sports therapist is not only there if you get injured. Their goal is to help you prevent injury in the first place.
Sports therapy can enhance your performance
As an athlete, you’re constantly training your body to be faster, better and stronger. A sports therapist can help you do that through personal and performance training.
What does that look like? In your sessions, you’ll share your personal and performance goals with your sports therapist. From that, they can help you come up with a personalized, performance-enhancing action plan to help you become better in certain areas. This can include:
- Strength training — Strength training can help you in all areas of your athletic performance. Our sports therapists are experts in the exercises that can help you increase muscle mass and capacity. They can also train you on the best ways to build up those muscles without overexerting or injuring yourself.
- Endurance training — Sports therapy is an excellent place to build up your endurance. Your sports therapist can help you identify areas where you need to build endurance and show you specialized exercises designed to target those areas. Together, you and your sports therapist can develop a treatment plan to help you build endurance without becoming fatigued too quickly.
- Addressing weaknesses — Your weaknesses are just as important to focus on as your strengths. Your sports therapist can help you identify physically weak areas and show you how to strengthen them. When you work on strengthening your whole body — strengths and weaknesses alike — you can perform better and decrease your risk of injury due to weak or underdeveloped muscles.
If you want to up your game, you need to learn how to help your body perform better. Sports therapy is a great place to get one-on-one instruction targeted specifically to your goals and current performance.
Sports therapy can help prevent injury
While physical therapy is commonly used after an injury, did you know it can help prevent injury, too? Your sports therapist can show you how to move in a more efficient and safe way to perform better while lowering your injury risk.
Compound movement training is an example of this kind of physical therapy. Compound exercises don’t isolate a single muscle group. Instead, these exercises use multiple muscle groups per exercise, which is a better replication of the kinds of movement you perform while playing sports. With compound movement training, you can:
- Burn more calories due to engaging more muscles at once.
- Increase your heart rate during strength training, which can improve your cardiovascular system.
- Lift heavier weights, which allows you to build your strength quicker.
- Improve your balance and coordination.
- Improve joint stability and mobility due to natural movement replication.
- Experience less fatigue during exercises despite continuing to work the same muscle groups.
Learning how to do these exercises properly can benefit your sports performance because you can perform strenuous exercises to build your strength without compromising your safety. This can help you prevent injury while training and during your sports performance.
Sports therapy can help you recover from an injury
While the goal of sports therapy is to reduce the possibility of injury, it can still happen. If you do get injured, we’re here to help. Sports therapists have extensive knowledge in helping athletes recover from sports injuries and get back to doing what they love in the least amount of time possible. Sports therapy after an injury can help with many different areas of your injury, such as:
- Improving your strength.
- Reducing swelling and inflammation.
- Improving your range of motion.
- Boosting your flexibility.
- Reducing your pain.
Recovery from a sports injury can be similar to recovering from any other injury. However, a sports therapist will likely know more about how your sport specifically may impact your recovery and what exercises you should focus on. Other techniques such as sports massage can also help you get your mobility back faster.
No matter what area of your sports performance you need assistance with, our experts at REPAIR SI are here to support you. Our sports therapists are trained to help athletes achieve — and maintain — their best performance. Contact our team today for more information on our sports therapy program or to schedule an initial appointment.