Sports Injury – Prevention Is The Best Cure
October, 2007
As I started to write this article, a doubt crept into my mind. Perhaps I am preaching to an audience already converted to the concept of injury prevention. In some respects this may be true, as a simple Google search under ‘sports injury prevention’ yielded some sixteen million results. It’s a lot, yes, but when you compare it to seventy-nine million results under ‘sports injury’ and over ninety-three million for ‘sports medicine’, it’s easy to see where the emphasis is. Seemingly most – if not all – sports injury prevention focuses primarily and quite sensibly on areas of training. These include using the right shoe, building in rest days, strength training, warm up and down and so on. Other specialist areas might focus on the health and safety aspects of a sport, particularly in contact sports.
Yet there is seemingly little or no focus on the role of the therapist in what I like to refer to as ‘pre-management’ of sporting injuries. This seems to me to be a missed opportunity and reduces the role of the sports therapist to that of fire fighter, being employed in emergencies and not generally considered as part of the global fitness regime of the athlete. Considering that only 50 percent of sports injuries are in new areas, it means that a good number of clients present with problems that were never fully resolved at the time of the original injury (Archives of Internal Medicine, vol. 149(11), pp. 2561-2564, 1989). It also means that many athletes are leaving themselves at risk of further injury and training lay-offs. There is a point at which an injured athlete is a sign of failure and bad management. John Smith plays five a side on a Sunday. He has poor flexibility levels, drinks too much and doesn’t take any other exercise during the week before throwing himself at a ball for two hours once a week. We can be safe in the knowledge that before long, John is going to land on our doorstep for his back/hamstrings/knees to be fixed up: a scenario with which we are all too familiar.
However, even the elite athlete can be the subject of poor management and lack of therapeutic care. This can be in several areas, all of which build up to create and perpetuate problems:
￭ Improper handling of original injury. Rushed or inappropriate treatment. The treatment is localised to the injury site.
￭ The injury is treated too often with no treatment recovery time built in.
￭ The athlete is returned to training and competition too soon with insufficient rehab and specific post injury training.
￭ Lack of a culture of ongoing preventative care.
￭ Athlete/coach too focused on results and not focused on fitness and flexibility levels and injury prevention. These are all issues which pervade the highest level of sport in the UK and which can create a culture where injury is equated to failure on the part of the athlete and where, therefore, an athlete may not even mention an injury to the practitioner. Although many elite athletes will have access to generalised sports massage on a regular basis, the treatment of specific risk areas relating to their sport or history is very rare. A programme whereby the athlete is treated like a formula one racing car is needed. In these environments, the car is designed, cared for and tuned on a constant basis and it would ill behove any racing team to wait until the car breaks down before any maintenance work is carried out.
This is where a therapy more recently arrived in the UK is trying to change hearts and minds. The Bowen Technique has been taught in the UK only since 1993, yet is already making a big impact across the field of physical therapy. It has become exceedingly popular with chartered physiotherapists, existing complementary therapists and some sports injury technicians. Simple to learn and practise, it can be applied regularly to a large number of people (in a team environment for instance) with no disruption to existing training or treatment. The main reason for its increasing popularity is the speed with which clients respond.
A standard soft tissue injury that might typically take ten days to two weeks to heal can often be addressed in half that time using The Bowen Technique. Bowen has a particular fondness for acute injuries and the normal waiting period to allow for inflammation to decrease is eliminated with Bowen. The technique itself is simple in its approach and application and involves the rolling of skin and superficial fascia over deep fascia and muscle with thumbs and fingers. In between each set of moves there is a short pause, where the therapist ideally leaves the room, allowing the client to rest, before the next short set of moves is applied.
The pressure used is relatively light and gentle and a long way from the deep pressure associated with the work of many sports therapists. A side effect of this is the ease on the therapists themselves, who find they can treat more clients and attain better results while experiencing little or no fatigue themselves in the process.
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