How can RHP help you?
Injuries in sport can be frustrating, disheartening and otherwise upsetting. The journey from the initial injury, through understanding the problem, into the rehabilitation process and back to your sport can be challenging. It may be short, or it may be long.
Whether you have suffered a mild injury, a major injury, or require surgery, the end goal should be to be more robust than before the injury happened. A common failure among people with injuries is a return when not prepared, which results in recurrence or a new injury.
Lessons from history
Many of our Physiotherapists are recognised in the industry as leaders in the “Sport and Exercise” field. This means you can expect a deeper understanding of both the injury or pain, and the requirements of your training and sport.
Returning to sport needs regular testing and progressions to ensure you are preparing for your sport as best you can. Often this journey will include multiple phases:
- Initial diagnosis of the injury to determine severity and possible structures involved
- Recommendation for whether scans are required. We may discuss options if relevant.
- Guidance for relative rest or protection of the injury, pain management and how to otherwise keep moving, because rest is not always best.
- We will ensure you and your coach understands the injury
- Initial goal setting and rehabilitation plan.
- Once pain and swelling has settled, you will start moving more. We will help guide this.
- Specific exercise plan for the injured area.
- Exercises for the rest of the body
- We can also provide a plan to keep your general fitness levels high.
- Return to run, throw, kick, hit, etc. will occur in a guided and structured way to prevent aggravation.
- You may start some parts of training towards the end of this phase.
- Here we start training, when you are adequately prepared.
- Monitoring your training volume, strength, recovery and more can help guide your readiness for the sport.
- Consider the specifics of your sport, have you done enough?
- high speed running
- repetitive jumping/ landing
- contact/ tackling
- throwing/ bowling/ hitting
- Congratulations! Hopefully we can even witness this important day!
(If not, tag us in your social media! We love this part of the journey.) - These final phases require input from your coach and anyone else in your healthcare team to ensure you have ticked every box.
- Be sure you read the next phase...
- It is easy to assume you are done with all of the attention to detail.
- Risk of any injury is x7 increased because of prior injury, so keep working on prevention.
- By preventing injury, you continue training. Continue training and you continue to improve.
- Prevention = performance. Let’s get there!
RHP Physiotherapists have aided in the return to sport of elite athletes from many different sports, both within the Brisbane community and on the National stage. One key to your success is in the ongoing attention to progress after returning to play. By preventing a recurrence or subsequently related injury, you will benefit from the hard training and perform to your best.