Injury Prevention in St. Ann, MO. Whether you’re an athlete hoping for an opportunity at the next stage, or you just retired and want to dedicate your time to camping, don’t let the fear of reinjury keep you from the happy, healthy lifestyle you desire. While our professional St. Ann, MO physical therapists work extensively with athletes and others to recover from injury, we are complete movement health specialists who can evaluate your movement, muscle and joint strength, and flexibility to show you measures that are proven to reduce the risk of injury. Request an appointment at Axes Physical Therapy today or call the location most convenient for you.

Being physically active is vitally important to many St. Ann, MO residents. We love activities like playing sports, kayaking, and more. Furthermore, pursuing an active lifestyle reduces the risk of significant health problems including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, degenerative brain diseases, depression, and certain cancers. Not only can physical therapy with one of Axes’ licensed St. Ann, MO physical therapists allow you to come back as fierce as ever, but our injury prevention professionals can help keep you active by improving your overall strength, flexibility, and posture. All of our methods, for both healing from and preventing injury, are based on evidence-backed techniques and are personalized to each client and the level of activity they want to reach.

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 St. Ann, MO for a free injury screening. To reduce your chance of an injury and ensure that you can continue with your sport or hobby, keep reading or inquire about an appointment at your earliest convenience.

Injuries Axes PT Can Help Prevent in St. Ann, MO

Most injuries fall into two categories:

1. Wear-and-tear injuries are injuries that occur when a part of the body repeats the same motion time and time again. They are common in overhead athletes athletes who are required to repeat throwing or striking motions, with joint pain usually being the first warning sign.
2. Acute injuries are injuries that happen suddenly. Examples include landing on uneven ground or receiving a blow. These can result in bruises, twisting joints, broken bones, and dislocations.

Some common injuries, 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 St. Ann, MO

While anyone can suffer an injury almost at any time and for numerous different reasons, they generally occur because your soft tissue, bones, and joints cannot hold up under the force, torque, or stretching that are required or are possible in a given activity. There are three main causes of why your body cannot handle an activity:

Muscle Imbalance

Muscle balance is crucial to maintaining healthy joints and reducing injury. Imbalance can lead to dependency on one set of muscles, causing it to perform actions it cannot do safely. It also prevents you from having good posture, and one set of muscles becoming tired more quickly, making them more susceptible to injuries. Muscle imbalance applies to inadequate muscle balance between muscle groups, such as having a strong hamstring and weak quadriceps, or in the same muscle group, such as an imbalance between the four muscles of the rotator cuff. Muscle imbalance can result in:

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

Customized injury prevention with our licensed physical therapists in St. Ann, MO will ensure that different muscles and muscle groups are equally strong.

Movement Dysfunction

Movement dysfunction can impact your stability and impede your body’s ability to naturally perform functional movements, causing injury. It can be caused by many different musculoskeletal issues. It can lead to:

• Joint mobility restrictions
• Muscle imbalance
• Poor coordination
• Decreased balance

At our initial injury prevention appointment in St. Ann, MO, we’ll evaluate your medical records and analyze your current movement health, strength, and flexibility. Then, in tandem with with your doctor or any other providers involved in your treatment, we’ll create a personalized treatment plan based on empirically-backed research and studies to get your body moving as it should.

Posture Dysfunction

Bad posture doesn’t just affect people who sit a lot. Athletes and other physically active people can suffer from postural dysfunction when lying down, using the computer, or in specific stances necessary for their sport. Healthy posture means proper alignments of your body from your head to your toes in a way that does not remove the spine from its natural curves. Poor posture can bring the joints in the spine closer together, which interferes with our body’s ability to communicate with itself and attain 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

By guiding you to ideal posture, we’ll aid in your injury prevention by ensuring you are using the right muscles for the right movements, your flexibility can be improved and maintained, and your spine is in its natural position.

How to Prevent Injury in St. Ann, MO

All sports and physical activities can potentially lead to an injury. No one precaution is guaranteed to be effective in injury prevention. However, there are several steps you can take to greatly reduce the risk of injury:

• Take breaks — Injuries are more common when you do not give your body time to restore itself. If you’re heavily active, 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 a break for the few hours after an activity so you don’t overwork your muscles and joints.
• Use the correct equipment — Helmets, chin straps, safety pads and guards, and other equipment necessary in sports and other activities can help prevent injuries such as bruises or concussions. If you’re returning to activity after an injury, your St. Ann, MO doctor or injury prevention specialist may fit you for braces or Kinesio Taping® to stabilize the affected area. Other methods like tying your athletic footwear tightly can further help injury prevention by stabilizing your joints.
• Boost muscle strength — Strengthening your muscles, tendons, and ligaments helps them withstand the force and torque necessary for in sports and other activities. Our St. Ann, MO injury prevention professionals will work to build up your body to be able to avoid injury in the activities you want to participate in.
• Boost flexibility — Stretching accomplishes three critical things for injury prevention:
  1. It improves which movements you can make and how far you can extend them, which allows for your tendons and ligaments to handle more forceful movements.
  2. It improves blood flow, which carries protein-rich blood to your muscles, removing waste byproduct and rebuilding the muscles.
  3. It encourages good posture, which we already know is an an important part of injury prevention.

  According to a peer-reviewed sports medicine paper, sports like football that require sudden twists and movements require soft tissue with sufficient flexibility to store and expel the high levels of energy required. Also, it’s important to stretch and warm up before any physical activity to further reduce the risk of injury.

• Use accepted technique — In every physical activity, there are accepted techniques to use. These techniques not only improve performance but help prevent injuries. Football players are taught to tackle with the shoulder in order to reduce the risk of brain damage, 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 educate you on how to improve it.
• Listen to your body — If you feel pain in a muscle or joint, that’s your body’s way of telling you something isn’t right. If you feel sudden pain, stop immediately and get the appropriate medical treatment. If your body isn’t feeling up to an intense training session, save it for another day.
• Don’t play through an injury — Even though teammates, competitors, and fans appreciate an athlete that plays through pain, forcing your body to perform with soft tissue or structural damage could aggravate a current injury and put you out of commission for much longer than you would have been sitting out. Depending on the severity of your injury, you may use methods like the R.I.C.E. method, seeing urgent care, and rehab with a physical therapist to make sure your body heals naturally and can withstand a return to physical activity.
• Follow the rules — Depending on the sport or activity and age level of the participants, it likely has special rules to reduce the risk of injury. Penalties for helmet to helmet hits in football, rules against head-first sliding in baseball, and even the presence of special lanes on the street and sidewalk for bikers are examples of rules that were adopted 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 in your best interest to see a doctor before another season begins or committing yourself to any strenuous physical activity. While there, inquire with your doctor if injury prevention with a professional physical therapist in St. Ann, MO is right for you. 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 Senior Citizens in St. Ann, MO

Falls in the elderly accounted for more than 3 million emergency room visits and more than 34,000 fatalities. Research demonstrates that physical activity is a great method for reducing the risk of falls. Other conditions that cause pain like arthritis that accumulate over time can be more bearable and take longer to progress with physical therapy exercises that keep your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints strong. While the physical demands for older adults may not be as high as an athlete, the same principles of strength, stability, flexibility, and optimal posture can greatly aid in injury prevention.

Other services we offer in St. Ann, MO include:

• Soft Tissue Mobilization
• Post Surgical Rehabilitation
• Shin Splint Treatment
• Direct Access Physical Therapy
• Gait Analysis
• Pelvic Floor Therapy
• Dry Needling Near Me
• Tendonitis Treatment
• Manual Physical Therapy
• Orthopedic Rehab Near Me

St. Ann, MO Injury Prevention | Axes Physical Therapy

Being injured in in an activity you prepare and train for and love can create a mental block that won’t allow us to experience the same euphoria. The knowledgeable St. Ann, MO physical therapists at Axes are here to design for you a personalized injury prevention program that will keep your body strong and flexible, and your mind confident that you do not have to fear going back to what you love doing most. You deserve to feel the physical and mental health benefits that you once valued so much. Request an appointment online or reach out to the location nearest you to learn more about what our St. Ann, MO injury prevention specialists can do for you.