Sports Medicine

Need Help Recovering from a Sports Injury? Looking to Improve Your Sports Performance? Sports Therapy is the Right Choice Sports Therapy or sport physical therapy is a specialized area of physical therapy that deals with acute, chronic, and repetitive injuries in professional, collegiate, high school and recreational athletes. Practice includes the thorough evaluation, treatment, transition back to sport, prevention, and performance enhancement programs. Conservative and Post-Surgical Rehabilitation Often, physical therapists work with post-surgical athletes to help them recover their strength, range of motion, and activities of daily living. To accomplish this sports therapy specialists use techniques such as:
  • Manual Therapy – specialized hands-on techniques to facilitate movement, and functional control.
  • Therapeutic Exercise – from active range of motion, to advanced resistance protocols, physical therapists help you recover the necessary strength to compete in your given sport.
  • Heat, ice, taping techniques, dry needling, and electrical stimulation
  • Functional Retraining – all sports require specialized balance, specific movement patterns, as well as dynamic flexibility and stability. Sports therapy includes retraining you in your given area of interest or excellence. Examples include helping pitchers recover their throwing mechanics, assisting football players in cutting, catching, throwing, and backpedaling and helping basketball players recover jumping, shuffling, and shooting mechanics. Movement re-education through the Feldenkrais method may be used to improve your sports mechanics.
  • Dynamic Strength & Endurance Training – most sports require endurance, balance, and short burst of intense strength output. In the later stages of rehabilitation of athletes, physical therapists transition you to advanced conditioning programs that closely replicate your experience on the court or playing field.
Prevention Physical therapists often provide interventions and recommendations to assist you, the athlete, with prevention of injury. This may include pre-participation evaluations, equipment advice, conditioning programs (e.g., ACL injury prevention) and cardiorespiratory conditioning programs that are constructed to assist athletes in a safe transition back to sport. Sports Performance Programs After a thorough evaluation of your strength, neuromuscular coordination, flexibility, and cardiorespiratory fitness, the physical therapist will develop a sports performance training plan to help you achieve your performance goals. Programs are tailored to specific sporting demands and provided to you as a training schedule (plan of action). The physical therapist may coach and guide you through a performance program on a several times/week basis, depending on your goals and needs. If You Or Your Teen Athlete Want to Speed Up Recovery, or Maximize Sports Performance, Contact Us.