We all know physical therapy can help after injury, but can it also help improve your sports performance?
In short, YES! Whether your sport is running, golfing, CrossFit, powerlifting, or a weekend warrior (amongst many others) physical can take your game to the next level!
Physical therapy isn’t just for injury recovery! Physical therapy should be an essential part of any program to prevent injuries and optimize your sports performance.
Our number one goal is to keep you as healthy and active as possible. Managing symptoms and maximizing activity and fitness can help you reach your goals. Let’s look at our top five reasons why!
5 Ways Physical Therapy Improves Sports Performance
1. Flexibility & Balance
Did you know that even the slightest muscle tightness and/or joint stiffness can greatly reduce your ability to move correctly? Which in turn, increases your likelihood of injury. Our team at PRO Therapy helps prevent this by keeping you in front of these issues. With targeted exercises to improve flexibility and balance, you will quickly be able to eliminate worry of injuries.
When at an appointment with a PRO Therapy physical therapist, they will manage your joint and/or muscle issues to relieve pain and restore function with such techniques as kinesiology tape, cupping, dry needling or manual therapy (aka joint mobilization/manipulation and trigger point therapy).
2. Range of Motion
This goes hand in hand with flexibility and balance. Regardless of your sport, one of the most important aspects to optimal sport performance is our range of motion. Without full range of motion, anyone’s overall abilities decline dramatically. A pitcher with a stiff shoulder. A runner with a hip issue. Golfer with a painful back. Basketball player with a stubborn knee. As you can imagine, any restrictions that limit the goal of your activity leave you susceptible to injury as well as inhibit your overall performance – regardless of your overall skill!
A physical therapist at PRO Therapy can work with you to improve your range of motion by identifying the obstacles that are preventing you from reaching your full potential regardless of your sport of choice!
3. Strength
Did you know, muscles that feel tight, are many times muscles that are not as strong as they need to be? Many people, athlete or not, believe that the sole reason for a muscle feeling tight is because it needs to be stretched. This is most definitely not always the case! Muscle strength is a critical factor to any athlete’s performance, no matter the sport or activity!
When muscles are strong, tendons are strong. When tendons are strong, joints and ligaments become more stable. When even a single muscle is weak, no matter how big or small, it can create a domino effect in other areas of the body, leading to overcompensation and you wide open to injury.
A physical therapist can identify the problem area(s) (quickly!) and in turn show you all the techniques to improve your sports performance. In turn, this will help you gain the most power possible behind each of your movements. By working directly with a PRO Therapy physical therapist, our assessments find these weak points sooner allowing us to focus and increase strength to avoid injury now and later.
4. Endurance
The obvious…a lack of endurance can equal a decline in sports performance. A lack of endurance can make even the simplest activities more difficult to complete.
You might be thinking this isn’t an area of concern for you as an athlete. Truth is that physical therapy sessions can be beneficial even if you already have a fair level of endurance!
We will work together on a program built to safely increase the intensity and duration of exercises specific to you and your goals. By strengthening your muscles, perfecting your form, and improving your cardiovascular system, you will find improvement in your conditioning can also lead to improved recovery times and decreased body soreness after workouts or other forms of activity.
5. Injury Prevention
What is the #1 way to keep you active and excelling at your sport of choice? Staying free from injury! At PRO Therapy, we design care plans meant to fully optimize your body mechanics, rid yourself of flexibility, range of motion and/or balance restrictions, also strengthen key muscles that contribute to injury prevention. It is not cookie cutter care!
You will learn strategies that you can take with you to apply to your warm-ups, training or running routines, including overall activities that can help you in and out of the clinic setting. There are so many benefits to being proactive with your health and performance.
A physical therapist at PRO Therapy can identify and help resolve any missteps in your form and movement before an injury occurs, keeping you in peak condition. An injury can mean months of rehabilitation before you’re able to get back to doing the things you love.
Staying active is crucial for avoiding injury – we know this. But what if staying active causes aches and pains or other contributing factors inhibit your overall performance? Well, you have a problem. Because what’s lurking right around the corner? Injury.
Partnering with a one of our Doctors of Physical Therapy is going to help you stay on top of your performance goals and avoid those dreaded injuries.
Do you have any questions for our team at PRO Therapy? Are you hoping to avoid injury specific to a sport or in general? Are you currently dealing with an ache or pain and need help? Give us a call! We offer complimentary phone and in-person consultations. We aim to meet our patients wherever they are in their journey and answer all questions we can to ensure a smooth experience at PRO Therapy. We want to help you make the best decision for you!
PRO Therapy is an Independently Owned Orthopedic Physical Therapy Clinic. At PRO Therapy, we treat back, knee, neck/shoulder, ankle/foot, and hip pain as well as sports injuries, surgery rehabilitation, and anything else that’s causing you pain. We want everyone to have exceptional care, better access to care and be able to complete the activities in life that make them happy – free from a life of painkillers, injections, or surgeries
