Injury Prevention in Marlborough, MO. Whether you’re an athlete and want to improve your performance, or a recent retiree who wants to dedicate your time to camping, don’t let the fear of reinjury keep you from the activities you love. While our professional Marlborough, MO physical therapists work extensively with athletes and others to heal after an injury, we are experts in the entire musculoskeletal system who can evaluate your movement, muscle and joint strength, and flexibility to guide you through methods that are proven to reduce the risk of injury. Make an appointment at Axes Physical Therapy today or contact the location nearest you.

Being physically active is vitally important to many Marlborough, MO residents. We love active endeavors such as playing sports, hiking, or other physical activities. Additionally, committing to an active lifestyle helps stave off significant health problems including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, dementia, depression, and many types of cancers. Not only can physical therapy with one of Axes’ licensed Marlborough, MO physical therapists help you come back even stronger after an injury, but our injury prevention professionals can help you reduce the risk of further injury by optimizing your overall movement health. All of our methods, for both recovery and injury prevention, are based on evidence-backed techniques and are developed uniquely for each client and the lifestyle they desire.

If you’ve recently suffered an injury, or have a persistent injury that is not getting better with time, contact the Axes Physical Therapy location most convenient for you in Marlborough, MO for a complimentary injury screening. To reduce your chance of an injury and ensure that you can keep up with your active lifestyle, keep reading or call to speak to a physical therapist at your earliest convenience.

Types of Injuries We Prevent Prevent in Marlborough, MO

Injuries typically fall into two categories:

1. Repetitive demand injuries are injuries happen gradually as a body part degrades because of repetitive movements. In sports, we see them the most in in overhead athletes such as softball or shotput and pole-vaulters and commonly manifest themselves as joint pain.
2. Acute injuries are sudden and spontaneous. Examples include landing on uneven ground or a sudden impact by an object or another person. These can result in bruises, twisting joints, broken bones, and dislocations.

Some of the injuries we see most frequently, for example rotator cuff tears, can either develop over time or occur suddenly. Other injuries, like ACL tears, are almost always the result of trauma, with a sudden impact to the knee.

What Causes Injuries? | Injury Prevention in Marlborough, MO

While injuries occur for many different reasons, and some are unpreventable, they generally occur because of dysfunction or instability and your body and between body parts. There are three common dysfunctions that lead to injury:

Muscle Imbalance

Muscle balance is key to supporting joints and staving off injury. Imbalance can result in an overreliance on one set of muscles, causing it to perform actions it cannot do safely. It also prevents you from having ideal posture, and the weaker set of muscles will be pushed past its limit, resulting in failure and a higher probability of injury. Injuries can be caused by poor 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. Muscle imbalance can result in:

• Muscle weakness
• Muscle inflexibility
• Poor muscle recruitment
• Poor coordination

Personalized injury prevention with our professional physical therapists in Marlborough, MO will ensure that different muscles and muscle groups are equally strong.

Movement Dysfunction

Movement dysfunction can impact your stability and lead to your body moving in unnatural ways, increasing your risk of injury. It can be caused by numerous musculoskeletal issues. Symptoms include:

• Joint mobility limitations
• Muscle imbalance
• Poor coordination
• Reduced balance

At our initial injury prevention appointment in Marlborough, MO, we’ll go through your medical records and analyze your current movement health, strength, and flexibility. Then, together with your doctor or any other providers treating you, we’ll develop a tailored plan of attack based on empirically-backed research and studies to get your movement health to reach its potential.

Posture Dysfunction

Bad posture doesn’t just affect people who spend a lot of time in the same position. People who play sports and other physically active people can have postural dysfunction when resting, sitting, or in certain body positions necessary for a given activity. Healthy posture means proper alignments of the neck, torso, pelvis, and extremities in a way that encourages our spine to stay in its natural curves. Poor posture can compress the joints in the spine, which disrupts our body’s internal communications and makes it harder to reach the strength and range of motion you need to achieve. It causes injuries through:

• Muscle weakness
• Muscle imbalance
• Poor positioning
• Joint mobility restrictions
• Poor muscle recruitment

Good posture is a vital part of injury prevention because it ensures you are using the right muscles for the right movements, your flexibility is not jeopardized, and your nervous system can communicate as its intended to.

How to Prevent Injury in Marlborough, MO

You can still suffer an injury even if you did everything you could to prevent one. No one safety tip is guaranteed to be effective in injury prevention. However, there are things you can do to make sure your body is prepared for your desired activity level:

• Take breaks — Injuries are more common in overworked bodies. If you’re heavily active, one or two rest days a week will encourage your body to naturally heal any mild pain or soreness. If you have a more modest activity level, rest for the rest of the day after an activity so you don’t overwork your muscles and joints.
• Use the right equipment — Helmets, shin guards, safety pads and guards, and other required equipment in many sports helps you avoid injuries like bruises or head injuries. If you’ve already suffered an injury to a joint or muscle, tendon, or ligament, your Marlborough, MO physician or physical therapist may advise braces or Kinesio Taping® to stabilize the affected area. Other techniques like making sure all the equipment is snug can further help injury prevention by stabilizing your joints.
• Strengthen muscles — Strengthening soft tissue helps it stand up to the rigors your body is put through in sports and other activities. Our Marlborough, MO injury prevention experts will work to achieve optimal muscle balance and strengthen the often forgotten muscles needed to safely participate in the activities you love.
• Improve flexibility — Stretching achieves three critical things for injury prevention:
  1. It enhances your range of motion, which lets for the tendons and ligaments connecting your muscles to your bones to adjust to more forceful positions.
  2. It boosts blood flow, which allows for nourishing blood to flow to your soft tissue, removing waste byproduct and encouraging the muscles to recover.
  3. It encourages good posture, which, as we’ve discussed, is is one of the most important factors of injury prevention.

  According to a peer-reviewed sports medicine paper, sports like basketball that include sudden twists and movements require muscles and tendons with sufficient flexibility to perform those movements. Stretching and warm up exercises before activities further helps prevent injuries.

• Use correct technique — In every sport, there are accepted techniques to use. These techniques not only help you perform better but help prevent injuries. Football players are taught to tackle with the shoulder in order to reduce the risk of a concussion, and rotational athletes like golfers and baseball players learn how to best rotate their body. We utilize DorsaVi video motion analysis to capture how you move and evaluate how to both improve your performance and reduce your risk of injury.
• Don’t ignore what your body is telling you — If a part of your body is sore, your body is trying to send you a message. If you feel something suddenly that doesn’t feel right, immediately stop all physical activity and seek proportional medical care. If your body isn’t holing up well in an intense training session, save it for another day.
• Don’t play through an injury — While teammates, competitors, and fans appreciate an athlete that guts it out through pain, forcing your body to perform with soft tissue or structural damage could exacerbate an existing injury and put you out of commission for much longer than if you had sat out at the time of the injury. Depending on the severity of your injury, you may use methods like the R.I.C.E. method, visiting urgent care, 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 coming from behind in soccer, and even the presence of special lanes on the street and sidewalk for bikers are examples of rules put in place to prevent injuries to ourselves and others. There’s a reason those rules exist, and a reason that there are penalties for them.
• Speak a licensed physical therapist — It’s always advisable to have a medical evaluation before a new season or starting up a new activity or training regimen. While there, ask your doctor if injury prevention with a experienced physical therapist in Marlborough, MO is something you should consider. All of our techniques have been proven to help athletes remain healthy, and you plan will be completely unique to you and catered to how old you are, any previous injuries, and how physically active you wish to be.

Injury Prevention for The Elderly in Marlborough, MO

Falls in senior citizens accounted for more than 3 million urgent care visits and more than 34,000 fatalities. Research demonstrates that being physical active is a great method for preventing falls. Other conditions 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 healthy. While the physical demands for seniors may not be as high as an athlete, appropriate strength, stability, flexibility, and optimal posture can greatly aid in injury prevention.

Other services we offer in Marlborough, MO include:

• Neck Pain Treatment
• Physical Therapy Clinic
• Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Treatment
• Sciatica Treatment
• Sports Medicine
• Hand Pain Physical Therapy
• Foot & Ankle Pain Treatment
• Hip Pain Treatment
• Plantar Fasciitis Treatment
• Stroke Rehabilitation

Marlborough, MO Injury Prevention | Axes Physical Therapy

Suffering in injury in one of your favorite activities causes a mental block that keeps us from experiencing the same happiness. The experienced Marlborough, 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 can safely return to the activities you love doing most. We will aid you in feeling the physical and mental health benefits of doing what you do best. Make an appointment online or reach out to the location nearest you to discover what our Marlborough, MO injury prevention specialists can do for you.