Sports Injuries
What are Sports Injuries?
At Richmond Osteopaths we see a lot of Sports Injuries. From running injuries to tennis elbow to skiing injuries.
Most sports injuries that we see are a result of doing too much too soon, causing a strain through a particular body part. Many people take up a sport such as tennis or golf and end up enjoying the sport so much that they forget that some preparation needs to go along with it.
The main injury for golf is knee pain, particularly the left knee for a right handed golfer. The body does not like to do anything repetitive. The force that travels up the body from the ground during the swing of the golf club hits the left knee a little bit more than then the rest of the body.
A main injury for tennis is tennis elbow, this is simply due to the amount of force and tension that is repetitively travelling through the elbow that is quite a bony structure. It does not have lots of big, blood filled muscles to absorb the shock. It inevitably ends up at the tendons, which don’t have as much blood and therefore ability to absorb shock.
Running injuries could be a wide range of things. Here are just a few that we have seen recently; plantar fasciitis, this is very common. The main reason for this is too much too soon. The amount of force travelling from the ground through your body is huge, this is know as ground force reaction (GFR). Others are, shin splints, a trapped nerve between the shoulder blades or a major muscles spasm between the shoulder blades, this can be very painful, fortunately short lived. I could go on and on about running injuries but I wont as we will be here all day.
Sports injuries are all apart of exercising and playing sports. It does not mean that something is wrong with your body, it means that your body is communicating with you and possibly asking for help and change.
If a muscle is tight, weak, tired or overused the brain will tell you by giving you pain. This is how the mind and body work together. If you are training for a marathon and ramping up the mileage, and you feel pain in your hips, this is your body saying that there is possibly some weakness or tiredness somewhere from your big toe to your buttocks.
At Richmond Osteopaths, our job, after dealing with the initial injury is to assess for any patterns of compensation. This could be a tight hamstring due to a stiff lumbar spine or tight plantar fascia in the foot due to a weak big toe, or shoulder tightness due stiff upper neck.
If you exercise regularly and play sports I would suggest having a treatment to check that your muscles and joints are not doing too much and are strong enough to cope with the level of activity required of it.