Injury Prevention in Ellisville, MO. Whether you’re an athlete hoping for a shot at the next stage, or a recent retiree who wants to dedicate your time to being physical fit, don’t let the fear of reinjury keep you from the happy, healthy lifestyle you desire. While our licensed Ellisville, MO physical therapists work extensively with athletes and others to recover from injury, we are experts in the entire musculoskeletal system who can evaluate your movement, muscle and joint strength, and flexibility to teach out methods that are proven to reduce the risk of injury. Schedule an appointment at Axes Physical Therapy today or contact the location nearest you.
Physical activity is vitally important to many Ellisville, MO residents. We love active endeavors like playing sports, swimming, and more. Additionally, committing to an active lifestyle helps stave off future health problems like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, degenerative brain diseases, depression, and certain cancers. Not only can physical therapy with one of Axes’ licensed Ellisville, MO physical therapists allow you to come back as fierce as ever, but our injury prevention specialists can help keep you active by optimizing your overall movement health. All of our treatment plans, for both recovery and injury prevention, are proven to be effective and are personalized to each client and the activities they want to return to.
If you’ve recently sustained an injury, or have a lingering injury that won’t heal on its own, contact the Axes Physical Therapy location nearest you in Ellisville, MO for a complimentary injury screening. To reduce your chance of an injury and protect your active lifestyle, read on below or call to speak to a physical therapist today.
Types of Injuries We Prevent Prevent in Ellisville, MO
Injuries typically happen for one of two reasons:
- Repetitive demand injuries are injuries that occur when a part of the body repeats the same motion time and time again. In sports, we see them the most in in overhead athletes athletes who are required to repeat throwing or striking motions and commonly are accompanied by joint pain.
- Acute injuries are sudden and spontaneous. Examples include landing on uneven ground or receiving a blow. These can result in bruises, twisting joints, broken bones, and dislocations.
Some of the injuries we see most frequently, like rotator cuff tears, can either develop over time or occur suddenly. Other injuries, like ACL tears, are almost always the result of trauma, with an immediate impact to or twisting of the knee.
What Causes Injuries? | Injury Prevention in Ellisville, MO
While anyone can suffer an injury almost at any time and for numerous different reasons, they generally occur because of dysfunction or imbalance and your body and between body parts. There are three common dysfunctions that lead to injury:
Muscle Imbalance
Muscle balance is essential to maintaining healthy joints and staving off injury. Imbalance can lead to dependency on one muscle group, causing it to perform actions it cannot do safely. It also prevents you from having good posture, and one set of muscles becoming tired sooner, making them more susceptible to injuries. Muscle imbalance applies to inadequate muscle balance in relation to other muscle groups, such as having a strong hamstring and weak quadriceps, or within muscle groups, such as the four muscles in the rotator cuff having different levels of strength. Symptoms include:
- Muscle weakness
- Muscle inflexibility
- Poor muscle recruitment
- Poor coordination
Customized injury prevention with our experienced physical therapists in Ellisville, MO will bring balance to your muscles.
Movement Dysfunction
Movement dysfunction can impact your stability and impede your body’s ability to naturally perform functional movements, increasing your risk of injury. Neurological issues, swelling, previous injuries, and muscle imbalance call all contribute to movement dysfunction. Symptoms include:
- Joint mobility restrictions
- Muscle imbalance
- Coordination deficits
- Reduced balance
When you first see our injury prevention experts in Ellisville, MO, we’ll go through your medical history and analyze your current movement health, strength, and flexibility. Then, in tandem with with your doctor or any additional providers treating you, we’ll design a customized game plan based on empirically-backed research and studies to get your movement back on track.
Posture Dysfunction
Bad posture is not just an issue for people with slouched shoulders. People who play sports and others with active lifestyles can be affected by postural dysfunction when lying down, driving, or in specific body positions related to their sport. Healthy posture means proper positioning when both static and moving in a way that encourages our spine to stay in its natural curves. Poor posture can bring the vertebrae closer together, which has a negative affect on our body’s ability to communicate with itself and achieve the strength and range of motion you need to achieve. It causes injuries through:
- Muscle weakness
- Muscle imbalance
- Poor positioning
- Joint mobility limitations
- Poor muscle recruitment
By guiding you to ideal posture, we’ll aid in your injury prevention by ensuring muscle balance, range of motion, and that your spine is in its natural position.
Keys to Injury Prevention in Ellisville, MO
All sports and physical activities carry an inherent risk of injury. We cannot promise that our injury prevention program completely negates the risk of injury. However, there are things you can do to greatly reduce the risk of injury:
- Take a rest — Your body needs time to rest and recover after any moderate to intense activity. If you have a very high activity level, make sure to take one or two days off per week to allow your body to engage in its natural healing and recovery processes. If you have a more moderate activity level, take it easy for the few hours after an activity so your body doesn’t become too fatigued.
- Wear protective equipment — Helmets, mouth guards, safety pads and guards, and other required equipment in sports and other activities helps you avoid injuries such as lacerations or head injuries. If you’ve had a previous injury, your Ellisville, MO physician or physical therapist may advise braces or Kinesio Taping® to stabilize a joint. Other methods like tying your shoes tightly offers further protection.
- Increase muscle strength — Strengthening soft tissue helps it withstand the rigors of heavy activity. Our Ellisville, MO injury prevention specialists will work to build up your body to safely participate in the activities you love.
- Increase flexibility — Increasing your flexibility contributes to injury prevention in three way:
- It enhances which movements you can make and how far you can extend them, which lets for your tendons and ligaments to adjust to more forceful movements.
- It boosts circulation, which allows for nourishing blood to flow to your soft tissue, removing waste byproduct and encouraging the muscles to heal.
- It increases your posture, which, as you read earlier, is an essential part of injury prevention.
According to research, sports like soccer that include dynamic movements require muscles and tendons compliant enough to store and release the high amount of energy required. Also, it’s important to stretch and warm up before any physical activity to further reduce the risk of injury.
- Use proper technique — In every sport, there are accepted techniques to use. These techniques not only help you get be the best athlete you can be but help prevent injuries by not forcing your body into unnatural positions and movements. Football players learn to tackle a certain way to avoid a head injury, and rotational athletes like golfers and baseball players learn how to best apply torque to your body. We use DorsaVi video motion analysis to slow down your movement and analyze how to improve it.
- Listen to your body — If a part of your body is bothering you, your body is trying to send you a message. If you feel sudden pain, immediately stop all physical activity and seek proportional medical care. If your body isn’t feeling up to an intense workout, don’t force it.
- Don’t play through an injury — While playing through pain is often viewed as a valiant act among competitors, playing with soft tissue or structural damage could aggravate an existing injury and put you out of commission for longer than it originally would have. Depending on what caused your injury and how severe it is, recommended actions may be using R.I.C.E. method, seeing an emergency room, and scheduling appointments with a physical therapist to make sure your recovery and return to action go as well as possible.
- Play by the rules — Depending on the sport or activity and age level of the participants, it likely has special rules to help prevent injury. Penalties for targeting in football, rules against head-first sliding in baseball, and even the presence of bike lanes are all rules put in place to prevent injuries to ourselves and others. There’s a reason those rules exist, and a reason that violations of those rules are punished.
- Consult a licensed physical therapist — It’s always advisable to get a physical before another season begins or starting up a new physical activity. During your physical, ask your doctor if injury prevention with a expert physical therapist in Ellisville, MO is something you should consider. Every treatment plan we employ has been demonstrated to help athletes remain healthy, and we’ll personalize your program to how old you are, any previous injuries, and how physically active you wish to be.
Injury Prevention for Older Ellisville, MO Adults
Falls in senior citizens accounted for over 3 million urgent care admissions and over 34,000 fatalities. Studies show that physical activity can go a long way in reducing the risk of falls. Other conditions that cause pain such as arthritis that develop over the course of several years can be effectively managed with physical therapy exercises that keep your soft tissue and joints strong. While seniors typically do not exert themselves as much as an athlete does, the same principles of strength, stability, flexibility, and proper posture are great agents in injury prevention.
Other services we offer in Ellisville, MO include:
- Vestibular Therapy
- Concussion Treatment
- Soft Tissue Mobilization
- Post Surgical Rehabilitation
- Shin Splint Treatment
- Direct Access Physical Therapy
- Gait Analysis
- Pelvic Floor Therapy
- Dry Needling Near Me
Ellisville, MO Injury Prevention | Axes Physical Therapy
Being injured in something you love doing causes a mental block that won’t allow us to experience the same elation. The professional Ellisville, MO physical therapists at Axes are here to design for you a personalized injury prevention program that will keep your body as safe and healthy as can be, and your mind confident that you do not have to fear going back to what you love. You deserve to feel the physical and mental health benefits of doing what you do best. Make an appointment online or contact the location nearest you to discover what our Ellisville, MO injury prevention professionals can do for you.