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Recurring sports injuries: What are conventional sports injury rehab methods missing?

Writer's picture: Jonathan BrownJonathan Brown

Updated: Apr 28, 2024


sports injury rehab, football injury rehab


How many times have you read the sports news and seen a headline about premier league footballer “X” is going to be out of action for 8 weeks with his third hamstring injury in two years.


History is littered with incredible athletes who had their careers cut short because of repeat injuries or being rushed back to the game following an injury. The role of any sports injury rehab program can play a crucial part of an athlete's (amateur or professional) longevity in their chosen discipline.


Sadly, after a couple of recurrences of a particular injury, many athletes feel that potentially unnecessary surgery is their only option. Sometimes their injuries have developed enough through poor recovery or by bad luck to the point that surgery is necessary. Either way, this is the last thing any athlete needs or wants as surgery comes with lifelong changes to the hardware of their body and a lengthy spell on the sidelines watching team mates or competitors thrive. 


Each sport has its own hazards, dangers and risks. But what could the standard of care be missing when an athlete twinges their lower back or hamstring for the umpteenth time? Let me tell you, it probably has very little to do with the fact that they didn’t do enough exercise or rehab type exercises. At the elite level, athletes are )generally speaking) fine tuned machines and follow rehab programs.


So what could conventional rehab programs be missing?


When an athlete gets an injury that is not indicative of hardware damage (tears to muscles/tendons/ligaments or soft tissue), rehabilitation processes generally take a few different paths:


  1. Soft tissue work (massage, dry needling, ultrasound treatment, tens machines etc)

  2. A good amount of rest (not exercising the affected/painful muscles

  3. Stretching

  4. Rehabilitative exercises (exercises targeting specific movements/muscles) in an effort to balance out “weaknesses” that may have caused the injury to take place”


I’m not trashing these methods at all as they definitely have their place. Soft tissue work and stretching improves blood supply which speeds up recovery processes as nutrients can get to the muscles/tendons etc that have been working. Increased blood supply aids with detoxification processes which massively aid recovery from any strenuous effort or trauma. Rest is a no brainer so well worth adding to the schedule. Rehab exercises can absolutely help with the comeback from an injury by fine tuning movement inefficiencies. 


Where almost all methods of conventional approaches to injury rehabilitation of chronic injuries/pain fall short is that they fail to accurately assess how the nervous system and its control of the muscles and movements in your body could have and may yet still contribute to the injury or pain.


If the assumption is that the painful hamstring is “weak”, then exercise will be prescribed to help strengthen it.


But what if the hamstring isn’t that weak? What if there is a level of inhibition (mild weakening) or even perhaps an increased level of activation in response to a perceived threat somewhere else in the body. 


For example, if your brain perceives there to be a potential threat to your knee when you rotate it in one direction, it will increase or decrease the activation of muscles/tendons/ligaments up and downstream of the knee in order to protect itself. That obviously includes the hamstring. So perhaps this “weak” hamstring isn’t weak at all. Perhaps it is hurting in response to your subconscious trying to protect you from another danger. 


But maybe it isn’t because of that scenario, maybe it is because of something completely different.


The point is, until you really break down and test the body and its efficiencies / inefficiencies in response to the demands put on it, how will you really know? You won’t.


That is why what we do here is different. We assess your nervous system and how it is subconsciously reacting to its environment and the challenges placed on it. We treat you as an individual and assess your unique symptoms as exactly that. That is why we are confident that any athlete that is struggling with chronic injuries can be helped.


Our Four Step - Treatment Process was designed to take athletic injuries into account and we work through the injury process from start to finish.


If you are suffering from a chronic or recurring injury that won't go away then get in touch.

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