Athletes: Recovering From An Injury
Lacey How To Recover From A Sports Injury
When playing in a sport, it is almost inevitable that you’ll become injured at least once. Most players after becoming injured would want to go straight back into the game, but obviously this can be a pretty bad idea.
If You’ve experienced an injury and want to recover quickly, contact us for a Free Consultation at 408-766-4322
Common Sport Injuries
- Shoulder Injury: Of all injuries this is the most common, mainly because shoulders are the somewhat weaker joints in the body and it comes under stress very often. Most injuries here will be a sprain, but can escalate to dislocation.
- ACL Tear: The ACL is a very important ligament that stabilizes the knee. Most often a tear occurs when trying to slow down and then make a quick turn. Typically a tear will cause swelling in the knee and make walking and turning uncomfortable.
- Hamstring Strain: Bruising at the back of the thigh is a good indicator that you’ve strained your hamstring. Usually this happens when you don’t stretch properly before playing.
- Hip Flexor Strain: The hip flexors are muscles on the front of the thigh and help to lift the knee to the chest. A strain would make movements like walking up stairs or running painful.
5 Steps to Recovery
The first step when you’ve become injured to offload any weight on the injured area. This will help to prevent further injury and to also give it an easier time healing. You’ll also want to rest, but do get up and move around a bit so your other muscles don’t weaken while recovering.
Once the injury has healed up a bit you’ll need to start on retraining. When you are recovering from an injury, the area is weakened and it needs help getting strengthened back up. You’ll want to gradually build strength back with strength training, but also keep in mind not to neglect your other muscles.
Now you should be feeling pretty good, but you aren’t done just yet. Now you need to focus on things like cardiovascular endurance, muscular endurance, muscular power, agility, and balance. If you don’t retrain these then you could be on a one track back to injuring yourself.
Finally, you are ready to go back to your sport! In moderation. You’ll have to ease yourself back into full time playing so as to avoid re-injury.
At this point you are now playing full time and are thinking, ‘Well what’s this step for?’ This step is to prevent injury by continuing training and learning about injury prevention techniques. This way you don’t have to go through all these steps again when you get injured again.
Why is it Better to Use Holistic Healing?
Holistic healing is a much better method of healing than using pharmaceutical pills because it works to prevent future injury. Using pills is fine for getting back up on your feet, but it doesn’t work very well long term as it only treats the immediate injury. Holistic healing on the other hand, works with you to regain the strength you lost while recovering and helps to teach you ways to prevent injuries in the future.