As a parent, getting your kids into some kind of sports activity is a common goal. It teaches them teamwork, keeps them physically fit, and busy. It also seems to be a huge source of athletic injuries as well. According to the Standford’s Children’s Health report, nearly 30 million children and teens are involved in some kind of sports or athletic endeavor. And, at least 3.5 million per year suffer some kind of injury that is serious enough that they have to quit or take time off from their sport and engage sports physiotherapy services. There are, however, a number of ways to help prevent many sports injuries, here are some examples.
Head Injuries Are Preventable
Here’s a startling statistic that will make you want to insist that your children, and everyone else you know, wear a helmet. About one-half of all head injuries are the result of just three sports, bicycling, skating, and skateboarding. Wearing the proper protection in those types of sports can go a long ways towards preventing injuries.
Overloaded muscles and twisted joints comprise another huge number of sports injuries as well. There are simple exercises that a person can do daily to help strengthen the muscles near ankles, knees, hamstrings, and other key places to prevent injuries. When a muscle is at it’s the highest point of overload it will either tear or a system shutdown called proprioceptors will take over and shut the muscle down. To learn more about sporting injuries and working with professional physiotherapists, check out https://kinematics.com.au
How Sports Physiotherapy Prevents Future Injuries
Unfortunately, our bodies have a defense mechanism that makes the muscles around an injury take over and prevent further trauma to that location. What this can cause is an altered movement pattern that can get permanently locked into your brain and nervous system.
Then, that set of muscles will be at a disadvantage, mechanically, because they are out of alignment making it more prone to injury in the future. This is why many athletes, once they’ve been injured, will continue to have problems in the same general area over and over again. Not getting injured in the first place is the best plan, but rehabilitation with the proper physiotherapist is also important to make sure you don’t heal improperly and end up with a continuous cycle of injuries in the same area.
A specialist sports physio clinic can provide remedial and sports massages to ensure that you don’t get the same injuries coming back.
There Are Dozens Of Injury Prevention Exercises
Several of the most common injuries are ankles, knees, lower back, hips, and shoulders. There happen to be specific exercises that all athletes should do in order to strengthen the weak areas around these joints to avoid painful and costly injuries in the future.
For ankles, the three best preventative exercises that a physiotherapist would recommend would be “Dorsi flexion” which strengthens the front part of your ankle. Then “Lateral Hops” to strengthen the whole ankle and entire body. And finally, the “Plantar Flexion” which concentrates on improving arch strength and will help prevent an inward roll as you walk and run. But remember that it is not all about exercises. It is just as important to keep an eye on nutrition. Sports nutrition is a very important aspect of recovering when injured and preventing further injuries.
If you do a lot of sports and are worried about getting injured, the best thing you can do is preventative exercises to protect various joints. These exercises aren’t difficult to do and will help you maintain overall fitness at the same time. The worst thing for your body is to get injured seriously and then have to be sedentary for a long period of time. Many athletes never really recover their prior fitness level after a long layoff while rehabilitating an injury.
