How do you know when it’s safe to return to sports after an injury?
Injuries are very common, therefore, people must be cautious about when it is the right time to get back to sports and follow all the steps that are needed to recover. One of the key factors in returning to sports after an injury is having a clear and detailed management plan. This will help people to understand how they can progress step by step in order to safely return to the sport or any form of physical activities they were taking part in.
The plan should begin by working on the specific injury itself. Some common sporting injuries are ankle sprains, strains, joint or soft tissue injuries, hence, it is important to make sure the person is recovering with the correct tissue healing or remodelling.
This process should involve targeted treatment and exercises that aims at getting the tissues back to full health. Sport-specific exercises should be included to complement the treatment program as well as rehabilitation that focuses on the tissues returning to their full capacity. Gradually, this program should build the client back up into full training and game simulation scenarios. At this point in time, the person should be at their full capacity again and can get back into sports or physical activities.
Is there any way that you can speed up injury recovery time?
When you’re recovering from an injury, you can’t specifically speed up the recovery time as each injury takes a different amount of time to heal. When people are following a management plan for an injury, it can be optimised during the time frame by sticking to the rehab programme and properly following it through. With or without speeding up the recovery process, what Core Physio aims to do is make sure that the person with the injury is progressing at the appropriate time. Sometimes during the recovery process, people start to reload the body by exercising and the body responds very well to this, hence people are able to move forward quickly because their bodies are tolerating it effectively.
Sometimes people’s bodies don’t respond as well to that load and we have to slow it down a little bit. This means that it’s a matter of matching the progression of your programme and your management plan as to how your body’s responding. If we try to speed up the process by removing some of these important steps, we end up with the risk of re-injury and tissue failure as a result of injuries caused earlier. This can take us back to the start of the process with more time away from sports or physical activities.
If you’ve sustained an injury while playing sports and would like to find out more about how our Physios can help then click on this link.